No one seriously interested in Sojourner Truth can afford to ignore this book.
A successful effort to separate a human being from the familiar "Strong Black Woman'' symbol she has become.
A powerful speaker who moved audiences to laughter even as she delivered harsh truths about slavery and discrimination, Sojourner Truth has in Painter (Standing at Armageddon, 1987, etc.) a congenial biographer whose work is as readable as it is scholarly. Information on Truth is frustratingly incomplete, but Painter shines when striving to separate facts from myths and assemble those facts into a reasonable whole. A slave in upstate New York until 1827, Truth gained from her intense involvement with Methodism a sense of self- worth as well as an opportunity to speak publicly at religious camp meetings around New York City. Following a curious period of attachment to the self-styled Prophet Matthias (to whom she gave her devotion and all her money), Truth joined a Massachusetts cooperative community, where she met some of her future antislavery contacts. Central to the story of her growing celebrity is, of course, the 1851 Ohio Women's Rights Convention, where, Painter convincingly argues, Truth made an effective speech—but not the expanded "ar'n't I a woman'' showstopper printed 12 years later by Frances Dana Gage. Likewise punctured are embellished accounts of Truth's meeting with Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe's largely fanciful Atlantic Monthly sketch of Truth, early examples of how various people (including, in this century, academics) craft "a usable Sojourner Truth of their own,'' emphasizing whatever they need her to be: slave, black, female, radical, or quaint. In this account, Truth is shrewd but angry, calling, Painter says, for revenge on " `white people'- -not `slaveholders' or `white southerners,' or any narrower subset of the guilty.'' That being so, one wishes Painter had contemplated more fully what this means coming from a woman who seems to have had an abundance of enduring white contacts but fewer blacks ones.
No one seriously interested in Sojourner Truth can afford to ignore this book.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-02739-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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