Young-adult readers will enjoy the memorable characters in Bailey’s fictionalized memoir about her small-town childhood in segregated 1950s Kentucky.
In her debut, Bailey offers a sweeping look at a life gone by, through rich portraits of the residents in her fictionalized hometown of Lakeville. Her well-written reflections reveal the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of human nature, and a few are notable for highlighting the tremendous human capacity for fairness and generosity. This is a nontraditional memoir, as the author focuses on the lives of others to highlight a parable that she associates with biblical scripture. Throughout the book, she writes dialogue in Southern vernacular, yet somehow sidesteps sounding hokey. Her most telling story is “A Fine One,” which begins: “Old people said there were good white people and bad white people, and good black people and bad black people.” It goes on to describe how members of her community, black and white, united to rebuild a home for African-American Earl Roy, despite the town’s segregation policy; however, they failed to assist others they deemed unworthy of assistance. Another story chronicles the missteps of Banty, the town’s bootlegger, who “was supposed to know Coffman County the way a man would learn the lines on his own face just by shaving every morning.” However, after reflecting on Banty’s life, the author weakly concludes, “Sometimes people do evil and you just have to learn to live around them.” Many readers may recoil at the book’s outmoded terms for race, or will be disappointed by how much is left unsaid. They may also wonder why the author doesn’t take sides on some clear injustices. That said, Bailey ultimately provides readers with a tenable view of how her “village” raised her. As such, the book is at once nostalgic, sad and illuminating.
An often engaging look at the daily lives of those in a thankfully bygone era.
Pub Date: March 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490828701
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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