A well-constructed life of a man who, largely forgotten, deserves pride of place in civil rights history.
Sturdy biography of a Black journalist, writer, and reformer who moved easily, if sometimes stealthily, between two worlds.
Walter Francis White (1893-1955) was born in Atlanta to light-skinned Black parents whose multiracial heritage spoke to the complex genealogies of the Old South. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond,” White would later write. “The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” The absence of those traits allowed White and his family to survive the waves of lynchings that plagued the South. In his early 20s, he moved to New York, where he worked as an investigator and sometime journalist, often returning to the South posing as a White man to examine racially motivated murder cases. Baime ably depicts White’s lifelong Zelig-like abilities: He was at some of the signal events of his time, taking his place at the lead of the Harlem Renaissance, doing gumshoe work in the immediate aftermath of the Tulsa Massacre, weathering the Red Scare, and accumulating scores of friends. The author brings us directly into White’s fascinating world, in which Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson were frequent guests at salons White held in Harlem, while “George Gershwin debuted Rhapsody in Blue on Walter’s piano.” Active in civil rights as a leader in the NAACP, White pressed Franklin Roosevelt to support activist legislation to advance Black causes, which Roosevelt did not do willingly, fearful that “he would offend a power base of his own party, the Democrats’ Solid South.” Fortunately, Eleanor Roosevelt reached out to express her support, trying to persuade her husband to do the right thing—and adding another friend to White’s long list. He died too young, and he was almost immediately pushed into the back ranks of the civil rights movement, although he was the primary architect of an anti-lynching bill that has yet to clear the Senate, thanks to the opposition of Rand Paul.
A well-constructed life of a man who, largely forgotten, deserves pride of place in civil rights history.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-44775-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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