A somewhat pedantic biography of a remarkable woman—author, journalist, socialist, feminist, and a founder of the NAACP. Despite her dry manner, Wedin (English/Univ. of Wisconsin, Whitewater) has thoroughly researched and recreated a life filled with drama. Ovington was born in 1865 in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in an abolitionist milieu, seized early on by an affinity for the Socialist Party and the working class, she also enjoyed a life of privilege and an education that led to the Annex, a college-level institution for women that was eventually renamed Radcliffe College. Ovington rejected the usual choices—marriage or domesticity with her parents—instead establishing a settlement house in Brooklyn; from there she moved to what was then a Negro neighborhood in Manhattan with plans for another settlement, beginning her dedication to the cause of black rights and opportunities, which engaged her until she died at age 86. For advice, she wrote to activist and author W.E.B. DuBois, beginning a friendship that was to last the rest of their lives. Race riots in Atlanta and Springfield, Ill., galvanized her to join with William English Walling, a southern white man, and Henry Moskowitz, a social worker, in launching the NAACP. She contacted her many black friends and acquaintances, and within five months, in May 1909, the fledging organization drew 1,500 people to its first public meeting. Ovington traveled, wrote, recruited, and organized among both blacks and whites for the next 40 years; she served as NAACP chairwoman for more than a decade. While she believed in educating blacks and whites about each other, she also advocated using the courts, the Congress, and grass-roots organizing to end racism. Overshadowed by others then and now, Ovington is revealed to be a courageous and politically astute woman, a ``torch-bearer,'' as Wedin calls her, against oppression and discrimination. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-16838-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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