A memorable tale of an unsung American hero, and a worthy history lesson as well.
Pulitzer Prize–winning Newsday reporter Donovan, now retired and a race-car driver, follows the hard-luck career of a man who challenged NASCAR’s racial barrier in the 1950s.
Growing up in the Deep South, Wendell Scott parlayed his early years as a police-dodging moonshine runner to become one of NASCAR’s best, most reliable drivers. If he didn’t finish with roomfuls of trophies to show for his two decades as a driver, it’s only because he labored under incredible disadvantages, most notably a lack of financial support from either NASCAR officials or the major car companies that poured millions into the sport. He was forced to drive a beat-up old car that he often had to repair mid-race—and that was when he was even allowed to the starting line. In the South, where stock-car and auto racing had its roots, Scott was routinely banned from entering racetracks like Darlington and Talladega. When he was allowed on the track, bigoted drivers often intentionally wrecked him while fans harassed him with racial slurs. His fortitude and persistence knew no bounds. Using his sons and friends as pit crew, he competed for more than 20 years until a wreck nearly killed him in 1973. It was typical of Scott’s bad luck that the wreck occurred in a brand-new race car that it took him 11 years to pay for. Donovan does an excellent job recounting the numerous roadblocks that were placed in Scott’s way. Even when he won his only Grand National race (now the Sprint Cup series), officials initially awarded the checkered flag to someone else; he didn’t receive his first-place trophy until a month later. Following the many other races in Scott’s long career may prove less fascinating for the casual reader, but Donovan provides additional interest with his portraits of such major players of the period as George Wallace and NASCAR founder Bill France Sr.
A memorable tale of an unsung American hero, and a worthy history lesson as well.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58642-144-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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
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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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