Very readable history of a forgotten period and a group that saved their school and taught the world to sing their songs.
A bittersweet and movingly told story of the African-American singers who introduced Negro spirituals to audiences in the US and Europe to raise money for their alma mater, experiencing great triumphs and humiliating prejudice in the process.
Ward (Our Bones are Scattered, not reviewed) begins the story in Nashville, Tennessee, as the Civil War ends and hundreds of freed slaves flock to the city. While rival church groups worked to establish schools, Ward concentrates on the institute founded by the America Missionary Association. Named after General Fisk, the head of the local Freedmen's Bureau, it eventually became known as Fisk University. By 1871, with Fisk deeply in debt and facing possible closure, George White, a devout abolitionist and music lover, decided that Fisk's only hope was for him to take a group of his nine best singers, men and women, on the road to raise money. Singing Negro spirituals, still unfamiliar to many in the North, they performed in halls and churches from Ohio to Massachusetts. Emboldened by their success but still needing money, White then took the group abroad. Ward vividly details their three lengthy tours that included visits to England (where they were guests of William Gladstone and sang for Queen Victoria) and Europe (where they performed for the Dutch and German royalty). They raised more that $150,000 (the equivalent of $2.5 million today), but it was at a cost: White was worn out, his successors overprogrammed the singers, the singers quarreled (and some left), and in the US they had to endure abuse, stay in inferior lodgings, and travel in segregated trains. But their songs were embraced by a whole new audience, moved by the melodies and words of hope.
Very readable history of a forgotten period and a group that saved their school and taught the world to sing their songs.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-18771-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
