Frustratingly sketchy as a biography, but a good portrait of the absurdities of apartheid and the grievous harm it inflicted.
O magazine contributing editor Stone tries to piece together the story of a South African woman whose racial classification under apartheid was changed three times.
Born in 1955 to Afrikaner parents who repeatedly swore that she was their biological child, Sandra Laing was raised as white until the age of ten, when she was sent home from boarding school because she appeared to be of mixed blood. Her father fought her reclassification as “Coloured” under the country’s Population Registration Act and succeeded in having her reclassified as “White” when she was 11. But at 15, Laing ran away with Petrus Zwane, a married, 25-year-old black man who took her to Swaziland. The text shows her to be unable or unwilling to articulate her motives for leaving home, though Stone tried hard to elicit them and speculates that fear of her harsh, unaffectionate, pro-apartheid father may have been one. Although life in Swaziland was hard, Laing found acceptance and affection there, especially from Petrus’s mother. She left Petrus when he became abusive, but stayed in the black community and asked to be reclassified as Coloured so that she would not risk losing her children. She lived with other black men and had more children, giving up three of them to the welfare system for several years when she was unable to care for them. When Stone contacted her, she was in her 40s and had from time to time been filmed and interviewed by journalists—to the chagrin of her white brothers and parents. The author had a hard time getting coherent information from Laing, who provided contradictory versions of significant events and relationships in her life, as well as her feelings about them.
Frustratingly sketchy as a biography, but a good portrait of the absurdities of apartheid and the grievous harm it inflicted.Pub Date: April 4, 2007
ISBN: 0-7868-6898-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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