A drama of crackling immediacy and with ringing outspokenness.
Leblanc takes no prisoners and hides few emotions in this firsthand account of her experiences during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
As the skies darkened in late August, 2005, Leblanc’s stomach was sinking: The weather forecasters were prevaricating, but “honestly, this time I have a feeling that something is about to go down in a serious-ass way.” Leblanc was both cool—“I choose to hang on to who I am: a strong, black woman”—and not so cool, letting her anxiety and rising panic permeate the story of the storm: the roof collapsing, the foul, dark water flooding in, an early death looking at her wherever she turned. Then came the days after, harrowing in their own special way—full of thirst and hunger, bone-deep exhaustion and evacuation disappointments, as well as a punishing sense of abandonment and a bitter taste of racism in action. She became one of the “FEMA people,” second-class treatment all the way. It was enough to give anyone emotional issues—the pharmacist filling anti-anxiety medications “is making serious bank off of us, and I’m guessing, the entire city of New Orleans since Katrina”—yet Leblanc is clear about what she went through, and brashly articulate: about greed, corruption, neglect and self-destructive behavior, enough so that Spike Lee featured her in his film When the Levees Broke. She also has plenty of disarming, street-smart advice for policymakers at every level about compassion, understanding, communication and resolution.
A drama of crackling immediacy and with ringing outspokenness.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6346-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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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