Provides some interesting tidbits but no great revelations, except on why she became a Republican: “I would rather be...
Former Secretary of State Rice presents a low-key, modest memoir about growing up an only child to highly educated teachers in segregated Birmingham, Ala.
The author poignantly depicts a Southern black culture strongly centered on the schools and the churches. In the era of Jim Crow segregation, racial prejudice permeated every facet of society, even within black communities where lighter-skinned people were offered better opportunities. Rice’s mother, Angelena, hailed from Birmingham and was college-educated and musical; her father, John, from Baton Rouge, was an ordained pastor, educational crusader and athletic director. The author was named after a melodious Italian musical term, con dolcezza (“with sweetness”), adjusted for American ears. Pushed at a very early age to achieve, she excelled at the piano, ice skating and the debating team. Early on she became keenly aware of the pernicious nature of segregation. By 1962, Birmingham had become a racially-charged, violent city. As John Rice’s career shifted from preaching to education, the family moved to Denver, where Rice entered college at age 16. Casting about for a major, she was influenced by former Czech diplomat turned professor Josef Korbel (father to Madeleine Albright) and embarked on Soviet studies and political science. The author chronicles a dizzying academic trajectory from Notre Dame to Stanford, where she eventually became a tenured professor—clearly an affirmative-action hire, of which she is “a fierce defender”—and, later, provost. While completing various prestigious fellowships, she befriended Colin Powell, who mentored her, and Brent Scowcroft, who invited her to join the Bush I team at the National Security Council in 1989, a time of spectacular changes in the Soviet Union. Rice briefly touches on these times, but keeps the focus on the last years of her parents, ending with her father’s death just at the election of Bush II.
Provides some interesting tidbits but no great revelations, except on why she became a Republican: “I would rather be ignored than patronized.”Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-58787-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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