A life and movement that deserve to be chronicled, but the book would have been improved by more judicious editing.
A story from inside the Black Panther party and its fight for black equality in the civil rights era.
An often uncomfortable but realistic picture of racial tension in the 1960s and ’70s, first time author Pharr’s memoir focuses on his experiences with the Black Panthers. The author was an active member of the party in Los Angeles, moving up the ranks until he found himself opposed to Huey P. Newton’s style of leadership and quietly disengaged himself. While Pharr is most intent on giving an inside view of the militaristic side of the Black Panthers, including lots of detail about a shootout with police at headquarters, he also describes some of the community activism the Panthers engaged in. Free breakfast for children and conflict resolution without police involvement are highlights of that work for the community. More detail about these and other programs would have presented a rounder picture of Black Panther philosophy and provided the book with a wider audience. Due to the spotlight on self-defense, police brutality is central to the story. While ugly, its inclusion will help readers understand the Panthers’ focus on defense and their own violent contributions to the ongoing conflict. Unfortunately, the dialogue is uneven throughout; while many conversations are laid back and full of slang, others are overly formal and even stilted. Liberal use of ’70s slang is likely to make this an inaccessible read for younger generations. While probably realistic to the time it covers, this is a serious problem for a book attempting to educate those who didn’t live through that period. “I believe the Black Panthers and other militant organizations,” writes the author, “did more to ensure our human and civil rights than all the marching and praying of the last 100 years.” That’s debatable, to be sure, but Pharr’s central story is gripping.
A life and movement that deserve to be chronicled, but the book would have been improved by more judicious editing.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-916-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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