A refreshing, well-researched contribution to Black women’s history.
A welcome biography of three noted civil rights icons who were indelibly influenced by their mothers.
In her debut book, sociology doctoral candidate Tubbs, a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge Scholar, offers informative, admiring biographical portraits of Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin, women who shaped the lives and work of their sons Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Although “almost entirely ignored throughout history…ignored in ways that are blatantly obvious when the fame of their sons is considered,” these women, Tubbs asserts, deserve attention because they represent the struggles faced by Black women from the early 1900s through the 1960s—and, attests the author, citing her own experience, even in the present. “I am tired of Black women being hidden,” she writes. “I am tired of us not being recognized, I am tired of being erased. In this book, I have tried my best to change this for three women in history whose spotlight is long overdue, because the erasure of them is an erasure of all of us.” Each woman believed in the importance of education for her children, and each advocated for civil rights: Alberta’s father was head pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church and a co-founder of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP; college-educated Alberta married preacher Michael King, and together they inherited leadership of the church. Louise left her native Grenada for Montreal, where she joined her uncle as a Garveyite and married a fellow activist. Berdis, single when she gave birth to James, had joined the Great Migration, first living with relatives in Philadelphia and then moving to Harlem during the Renaissance, where she married James’ stepfather. Contextualizing the women in their tumultuous times, Tubbs examines racism, police brutality, and life under Jim Crow to establish “the direct connection” between the mothers and their sons’ “heroic work.” The men, writes the author, “carried their mothers with them in everything they did.”
A refreshing, well-researched contribution to Black women’s history.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-75612-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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