A celebrity autobiography with substance and political punch.
Before she walked a runway, the author walked for weeks to escape civil war.
The seventh of nine children born to a Dinka family, Wek was eight when war came to her hometown in southern Sudan. Overnight, childhood became terrifying. Some of the tricks she now uses on the runway she learned as a frightened child: Throwing her shoulders back and lengthening her body helped flatten her against the floor to escape the whizzing bullets of militiamen. Eventually, much of her family made its way to London. Wek spent her teenage years learning English, adjusting to British cuisine, going to school, babysitting for nephews and nieces. While wandering through a street fair in 1995, she was approached by an agent who asked if she’d ever considered modeling. Her mother worried that agents were just leeches, but Wek gave the fashion world a whirl anyway. Readers will be disarmed by the down-to-earth, intimate voice in which she narrates her stratospheric rise. Wek has used her platform to raise awareness about Sudan, meeting with members of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. She also reflects sagely on color and racism. “Whether I like it or not, my skin defines me,” she observes, admitting that her dark coloring has both helped and hurt her career. Initially, she had to fight against being typecast, offered only “work that called for ‘black’ features.” Now she ponders her possible complicity in the historical use of exploitative images of black people to sell everything from Robertson’s jam to Uncle Ben’s rice.
A celebrity autobiography with substance and political punch.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-124331-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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