Berry continues to demonstrate an uncanny aptitude for weaving African-American history into entertaining, empowering...
Sociologist, motivational speaker and novelist Berry (When Love Calls, You Better Answer, 2005, etc.) digs deep to expose the roots of her family tree.
In the introduction to this intensely personal journal of her life, the author admits to a major injustice in her debut novel (Redemption Song, 2000). For the character of an antagonistic plantation owner, she used the actual name of the man who had owned the plantation she was raised on in Delaware. Though her mother told her John Hunn was a good man she refused to believe it. Her memoir seeks to make amends to Hunn, an altruistic Quaker abolitionist and “the southernmost conductor of the Underground Railroad,” while concurrently presenting her family history, saturated with stories, lyrics, proverbs, literary quotations and sage words of spiritual inspiration. Berry praises the inner strength of her mother, a hard-drinking, pious single parent raising seven children on her own in Wilmington. Though they were “cold and poor,” she writes, their gloomy fatherless family life was leavened with laughter and an unshakable sense of reverence and hope. Determined to be educated and successful, the author also pined for love and married twice, once right out of graduate school and again for the sake of her children. She doesn’t dwell on the painful, tragic moments of her past, she writes, “so that we can move right on to the healing.” Berry also retraces the path of liberation of black people from the chains of slavery. The discovery of Hunn’s benevolent history offered her first taste of spiritual freedom. Following a great deal of research and introspection, the author has created a positive book that spotlights family bonding and personal emancipation. “When we remember our ancestors and their stories,” she notes, “we light a pathway for our own journey to spiritual, emotional, and intellectual freedom.”
Berry continues to demonstrate an uncanny aptitude for weaving African-American history into entertaining, empowering stories both fictional and personal.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2414-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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