A David and Goliath story in which Goliath wins.
An African-American washerwoman seeks justice from an entrenched government.
Legal historian and activist Berry (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice, 1999) unearths the tale of Callie House (1861–1928), a forgotten figure of post-Reconstruction history. The period of House’s youth, writes Berry, is considered the nadir of civil rights, “the lowest point along the long, rough road African Americans had traveled since Emancipation,” when poll taxes, literacy tests and discriminatory legislation barred blacks from voting and withheld other rights; at the same time, the federal government defaulted on its promises to grant land and financial relief to former slaves while granting amnesty to former slaveholders, even encouraging those former slaves to return to the old plantations to work as laborers. Against this climate, House founded the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association to advance proposed reparations that linked payments to those born into slavery to pensions paid to former Union soldiers. The movement, writes Berry, found opposition on all sides, and many prominent African-American newspapers and politicians derided House’s efforts as “a distraction from the struggle for political rights and a hopeless cause.” More ominously, postal officials in Tennessee, where House lived, suppressed the movement, prosecuting House for mail fraud as she solicited funds to support the organization. Though the government’s case was weak, House was imprisoned for a time, working alongside the anarchist Emma Goldman as a prison seamstress. Her movement fell into disrepair, and House lived out the last years of her life in obscurity. Berry’s careful consideration of these events is of much use to historians of the early civil-rights movement; of more interest to general readers is her epilogue, linking House’s efforts to current ones to seek financial compensation for the descendants of slaves.
A David and Goliath story in which Goliath wins.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4003-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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