by Caille Millner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 19, 2007
The reader is left with unanswered questions, and the author remains a stranger.
A young black woman’s search for identity takes her from a blue-collar Latino neighborhood in San Jose, Calif., to Silicon Valley, Harvard and beyond.
Debut memoirist Millner describes her childhood as a “mélange of cheerful American pragmatism and Latin baroque and African-American skepticism.” In each of these worlds, she remained the observant outsider. When she was a teenager, her parents, who placed a high value on education, moved the family to Almaden Valley, where she attended a nearly all-white, all-girls Catholic high school. Her struggles with racism at the school led to her first published piece, an article in the San Jose Mercury News that brought uncomfortable notoriety to the overachieving teenager. During this time, Millner was using marijuana, mushrooms, acid and alcohol; cocaine and amphetamines would follow. Fortunately, she found a better way of dealing with her anger and despair by writing for Youth Outlook, a nonprofit organization that gives disadvantaged teens a chance to report and write for the mainstream media. After high school, Millner enrolled at Harvard. The university had a substantial African-American community, but she soon became disenchanted by the disconnect between the other black students’ words and their actions. During a later stay in South Africa, she had a disastrous love affair with an Englishman, a frustrating venture into political activism in a Cape Town neighborhood and a troubling visit to a settlement created exclusively for descendants of white settlers. Millner writes rather obliquely about her experiences and her occasionally bruising encounters with aspects of American culture: Concrete details take second place to feelings, and influential figures in her life are described in carefully crafted first-person essays.
The reader is left with unanswered questions, and the author remains a stranger.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2007
ISBN: 1-59420-109-9
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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by Oral Lee Brown with Caille Millner
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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