Invaluable for scholars of the era, though many readers will yearn for more of the author’s warm, human voice.
A veteran academic recalls his involvement in the meetings, demonstrations and civil unrest at the dawn of his career at the University of Chicago.
McKersie (Business, Emeritus/MIT Sloan School of Management) and his wife moved to Hyde Park in 1959, where he very quickly became involved in human rights issues, initially through his church. Even at the time, he knew he was caught up in something significant, so he began the files and the journal that inform this mixture of memoir, social history and academic analysis. The author focuses on a handful of issues—employment, education, housing and minority businesses—but he also highlights some significant personalities, including notables Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson (with some glimpses of Dick Gregory) and also those not as well-known outside the city and the times: Al Pitcher, Tim Black and Alex Poinsett. He offers a tribute to each of them near the end. The author notes continually his various frustrations and anxieties (“I shuddered at the thought of being arrested,” he writes)—and, in one violent march, his fears. He recognized—even at the time—the tension between the black and white leaders. He noticed the virtual absence of women among the leadership. He often wondered about the tactics employed, especially the many marches to the home of Mayor Daly and the focus on removing from office Superintendent of Education Benjamin Willis—an effort that proved futile. McKersie maintains a refreshing tone of self-deprecation, too, noting on one occasion his “small, weak voice” at a meeting. The best, most engaging parts are his personal memories—sitting on lawns, marching in the streets, worrying and wishing. He appends some useful maps and a timeline.
Invaluable for scholars of the era, though many readers will yearn for more of the author’s warm, human voice.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8093-3244-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
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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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