An exemplary graphic work built on a foundation of impressive scholarship.
A graphic narrative gives an unjustly neglected period in American history a labor-of-love illumination.
Mitchell’s rigorous academic research confirms that Oscar Dunn (1826-1871), the first Black lieutenant governor (and acting governor) in American history, is a worthy subject for such a biography, but for the author, this was clearly personal: “Dunn is my ancestor.” As he explains, what started him on the road toward his doctoral dissertation was the lack of knowledge about Dunn in his native state of Louisiana. In New Orleans, his great-grandmother had told him about the familial connection. “Some of these facts I learned that day sitting on my Grandmaw’s couch,” writes Mitchell, “and others I filled in over the years as I came to learn more about my trailblazing ancestor.” However, when he tried to tell his class about his illustrious ancestor, his teacher responded that there had never been a Black governor or lieutenant governor in Louisiana, and the whole class laughed at him. In this powerful work of historical excavation, the author sets the record straight, showing how Dunn navigated his way through the complicated politics and race relations of the state as well as a bitter rivalry with the corrupt governor (the two offices were elected separately). Dunn’s funeral procession drew a crowd of 20,000, “one of the largest funeral gatherings in the history of New Orleans.” In 1873, the new governor allocated funds for a monument, but it was never built, likely due to “the looming collapse of Reconstruction and increasing governmental chaos in Louisiana.” Throughout, Edwards’ vivid illustrations ably capture Dunn’s dignity and the era’s turmoil, providing narrative momentum to a story that features a few twists and turns. The incisive combination of text and illustrations creates an entirely satisfying historical story of both Dunn’s legacy and that of Reconstruction in general.
An exemplary graphic work built on a foundation of impressive scholarship.Pub Date: March 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-917860-83-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The Historic New Orleans Collection
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.
The bestselling author recalls her childhood and her family’s wartime experiences.
Readers of Winspear’s popular Maisie Dobbs mystery series appreciate the London investigator’s canny resourcefulness and underlying humanity as she solves her many cases. Yet Dobbs had to overcome plenty of hardships in her ascent from her working-class roots. Part of the appeal of Winspear’s Dobbs series are the descriptions of London and the English countryside, featuring vividly drawn particulars that feel like they were written with firsthand knowledge of that era. In her first book of nonfiction, the author sheds light on the inspiration for Dobbs and her stories as she reflects on her upbringing during the 1950s and ’60s. She focuses much attention on her parents’ lives and their struggles supporting a family, as they chose to live far removed from their London pasts. “My parents left the bombsites and memories of wartime London for an openness they found in the country and on the land,” writes Winspear. As she recounts, each of her parents often had to work multiple jobs, which inspired the author’s own initiative, a trait she would apply to the Dobbs character. Her parents recalled grueling wartime experiences as well as stories of the severe battlefield injuries that left her grandfather shell-shocked. “My mother’s history,” she writes, “became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me….Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them.” Winspear also draws distinctive portraits of postwar England, altogether different from the U.S., where she has since settled, and her unsettling struggles within the rigid British class system.
An engaging childhood memoir and a deeply affectionate tribute to the author’s parents.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64129-269-6
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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