A slow retracing of the roots of one of America's earliest—and most racially diverse—families.
Winch (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston; A Gentleman of Color, 2003, etc.) explores real-estate tycoon Jacques Clamorgan's rise to prominence in St. Louis in the late 18th century, as well as the entangling aftermath of the land and children he left behind. “This is a tale about money, land, power, and the nation's obsession with race,” writes the author—all of which she explores within the single Clamorgan family line. The family was full of colorful characters, such as the biracial Apoline Clamorgan, the daughter of Jacques, who employed sexuality as a tool for her own advancement; and Louis, Apoline's son, who used his street smarts to become “a man of prominence” throughout St. Louis. Of the many branches of the twisted family tree, the story of Cyprian Clamorgan, Apoline's youngest son, proves most captivating. Though he easily passed for a white person, his primary power was unrelated to race, but in his ability to swindle. Cyprian's varied schemes pegged him as a notorious fraud who regularly spent time in the courtroom, earning a number of enemies along the way. Yet perhaps the most engaging aspect of the Clamorgan story isn't what the family was, but what they might have been. Winch notes that if Jacques's vast land claims had been recognized, St. Louis might be called Clamorganville today. Likewise, with the proper schooling and connections, the gun-toting, scheming Cyprian might have become a governor or a “leading African-American writer, challenging the nation of the post–Civil War to examine anew its understanding or race.” A tale well worth telling, though the stilted pace may limit the book’s appeal to general readers.
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9517-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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