A sobering account of women's struggle for opportunity and equality in the work force, seen through the eyes of one of the leaders in the fight. Gould's professional life was dedicated to ``helping women broaden their options'' (she was director of career services at Barnard College and later a founder and director of its Women's Center, an early force in women's studies). Her narrative relates in concrete detail and in more philosophical consideration Gould's brave and dedicated personal and professional fight for expanded horizons for herself and other women. Juggling begins with an ``epiphany,'' the moment when, as a 35-year-old mother of two and supportive doctor's wife, Gould realized that the world of open possibilities had vanished for her: ``I had reached the high point in my life when I was nineteen and it had been downhill ever since.'' Subsequent chapters on Gould's childhood, adolescence, and college years offer insight into how her family and complex Jewish background helped to shape her character. And the quirky and interesting family members and their history offer an exciting narrative of immigration, fortunes won and lost, and both close and fractured family ties. The remainder of Gould's memoir primarily reviews her professional career, beginning with her daring reentry into the work world during the 1950s. As Gould shares the many obstacles she faced in returning to work as a career counselor for ``reentries'' like herself, as well as the resistance she met among certain colleagues at the university level, her readers will likely accept the pioneer status she claims for herself. Gould is characteristically honest about the limitations of her experience: She worked primarily with white, middle-class women—women like herself. Despite this admitted shortcoming and the occasional excess of personal information, Juggling provides an honest and insightful consideration of one courageous woman's experience.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55861-172-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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