Frank and feisty.
Former Goodyear floor manager turned equal-rights activist Ledbetter knew from childhood that she “was going somewhere special.”
However, the Alabama native never dreamed that she would one day spearhead the fight for equal pay for working women. Ledbetter grew up in the Southern backwater town of Possum Trot at a time when women were expected to do little more than find a husband and have children. After marrying at 17, she became a depressed, dissatisfied stay-at-home mother of two. Against her traditionalist husband’s wishes, she took a minimum-wage part-time job, which quickly turned into a full-time office-management position. Still, her success on the job was always tinged with working woman’s guilt: “someone or something was not always tended to properly” at home. At 41, Ledbetter decided to become a supervisor at a local Goodyear plant to help ensure her family’s security. A few of her mostly male colleagues supported her, but she often felt as though she was “a missionary in a strange land, trying to convert [the natives] to a new religion.” The author struggled against hostility, harassment and endless humiliation for almost 20 years only to discover that her male counterparts were making thousands of dollars more per year than she was. For 10 years after that, she pursued bitter anti-discrimination court battles that yielded nothing financially but eventually brought into existence the fair-pay legislation that bears her name. Ledbetter’s story is inspiring, but some readers may wonder why she persisted in a job that, for all its apparent prestige, proved so physically and emotionally damaging to her.
Frank and feisty.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88792-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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