As a self-styled ``cultural diary,'' this sequel to Taulbert's rich memoir, Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored (1989), often fails to rise above a matter-of-fact blandness. In 1963, Taulbert, a hope-filled high-school valedictorian, left his home in the Mississippi Delta aboard the Illinois Central bound for St. Louis. His trip was in part sponsored by his father, a Baptist preacher whom he'd never seen. When they finally met in St. Louis, the man left the bewildered youth with relatives on North Spring Avenue and informed him that they ``probably'' would not have a relationship (Taulbert later describes sneaking into his father's church to hear him preach). The author's new extended family included bossy Mama Beulah and her daughter, Dora; Uncle Madison, who owned the grocery store above which the family lived; and friendly, gentle Aunt Clara. Taulbert shared a dingy room with a cousin, worked part-time at the store, and attended the Lively Stone Church of God. Here, he details how he acquired his ``city'' clothes, got a ``northern haircut,'' reacted to his first snowfall, and made his first friends. A highlight—for the author, anyway—is his first trip back home, where he got the royal treatment (including meals and southern hospitality that he describes with some warmth, although the magic phrase ``sweet potato pie'' becomes a bit tiresome). Taulbert's story continues with his first jobs in St. Louis—as a dishwasher and bank messenger—through his enlistment in the Air Force, boot camp in Texas, and stint in Maine during the Vietnam War. Some charming moments, but not the equal of Taulbert's first book as here he fails to mine personalities and situations seemingly laden with possibility.
Pub Date: July 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-933031-62-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Council Oak
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
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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