Another simplistic pigeonhole useful for any junior siblings who want to blame someone else for their own problems: the disadvantageous fate of being a little sister. There are theories (psychologist Alfred Adler’s, notably) that suggest birth order is responsible for character—that is, firstborns tend to be conventional, though achievers, and lastborns, rebellious and adventurous. Generally speaking, that theory has seeped in as just another ingredient of our now prevalent mental health stew, but Lieberg stirs it back to the top with this banal conglomeration of anecdotes, interviews, and academic references that is supposed to pass for insight. Divided into five repetitious chapters, her small volume opens by describing what being a little sister entails (many variations); relationships with older siblings (good and bad); survival skills (flattery, sulking, tattling); and which effects of being Her typically carry over to adulthood. Subsequent chapters discuss self-esteem (how to keep up with the achievements of older siblings), competition (a Darwinian scramble), mischief-making and rebellion (how to get noticed), and adult relationships (little sisters look for older brothers to marry). Many of the less-than-riveting anecdotes concern the interaction between the author and her older brother. For instance, the story of the latter’s vomiting his spinach onto his dinner plate is neither endearing nor enlightening: —Jerry was getting more pressure to eat the spinach than I was. Perhaps he was fighting it harder, or perhaps he was getting a special invitation to show his little sister how big boys should behave.— Spinach was never again served in that household—a small victory for both little sister and big brother. Each chapter offers a list of famous little sisters, ranging from nutritionist Adelle Davis to Anita Hill, and including Gloria Steinem and Maya Angelou. Precious and contrived—enough to give little sisters a bad name.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-885171-24-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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