A comprehensive biography of the great coloratura whose role as a symbol of early civil rights efforts almost overshadowed her triumphs as a singer. Author Keiler (Music/Brandeis Univ.) has interviewed nearly 100 people and culled published and unpublished accounts to track Anderson’s life from her childhood in Philadelphia to her death at 96. Her talent recognized and supported early on by her family and community (“Come and hear the baby contralto, ten years old,” boasted one flier), Anderson nevertheless struggled to finish high school and find voice teachers. Tours of southern colleges helped her build confidence, but she was also frustrated by Jim Crow laws. Forays into Europe eventually led to huge success; the New York Times critic proclaimed Anderson “one of the great singers of our time.” With Sol Hurok as her manager, she toured the world for the next quarter of a century, sometimes giving as many as 80 concerts a year. But it was her rejection by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who refused to let her sing in their Washington, D.C., concert hall, that made her an icon. An estimated 75,000 people came to hear her at the substitute concert held in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Keiler lays out carefully the black activist strategy that led to that triumph, and never forgets as he recounts Anderson’s continuing successes both in music and politics’she was a US delegate to the UN—and her humiliations and rebuffs because she was a dark-skinned black woman. Though he gives few details about the development of the remarkable voice that Toscanini described as heard “once in a hundred years,” Anderson aficionados, will cheer his list of her repertory, discography, and survey of “live material” (unissued tapes and recordings). A commendable, carefully researched womb to tomb story of a great lady, especially praiseworthy in capturing the difficulties facing an extraordinarily talented black artist in a recalcitrant white world. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-80711-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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