Contains several memoirs in one: ambitious, relentless, and occasionally messy.
A detailed pursuit of the author’s ancestors, from the South to the North.
Through the prism of her distant family’s story, Buckley (American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm, 2002, etc.), the daughter of Lena Horne, fleshes out a middle-class black family’s journey of hard work, education, and aspiration in a deeply racist United States. Her narrative begins at the time of emancipation for patriarch Moses Calhoun, an educated former butler on a plantation in Atlanta, Georgia, who began to climb the ladder of success in 1865 by marrying, opening a grocery store, buying property, and becoming “a pillar of Atlanta’s black community.” His daughters, Cora and Lena, were educated in the missionary-run schools at the apex of Reconstruction, just as the Jim Crow laws instituting segregation were taking effect in Tennessee and elsewhere. Cora married the handsome, twice-widowed teacher and Republican activist journalist Edwin Horn in 1888 and moved to New York City in 1896, part of the great Northern migration of the Talented Tenth (W.E.B. Du Bois’ name for the country’s highly educated blacks). Edwin would switch party affiliations and become a “political New Negro,” a Democrat, and leader of the so-called Black Tammany; the couple joined the Brooklyn bourgeoisie and the NAACP. With the birth of their granddaughter, Lena Calhoun Horne, in 1917, the story inevitably follows the rising star of the author’s mother, largely abandoned by her parents and raised by her grandmother, Cora, through the heady Harlem Prohibition years (also the height of lynchings in the South). While Lena’s dark skin was both a hindrance and help to her career (too dark for the white stage, too white for the black), she found her movie-star spot during World War II. The author later weaves her own story of 1960s political awakening into this thoroughly jam-packed narrative of history and nostalgia.
Contains several memoirs in one: ambitious, relentless, and occasionally messy.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2454-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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