A moving story of a poor family's unforeseen contribution to the civil-rights struggle in America. News of the 1954 Brown decision ending segregated public schooling took its time reaching the Mississippi Delta, a backward area that a 19th-century traveler described as a ``lush, seething hell.'' In the fall of 1965, Mae Bertha Carter enrolled seven of her eight children in the hitherto all-white Drew, Miss., school system. As Carter tells legal scholar and debut author Curry, she was inspired by John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the recently assassinated Medgar Evers. She expected to take heat for her actionafter all, she had not long before remarked to neighbors regarding civil-rights movement actions like the famous Greensboro, N.C., diner sit-in, ``Ain't none of that ever gonna happen in Mississippi or get to us out here on these plantations.'' She did not, however, expect the storm of controversy that descended on Drew in a swirl of freedom riders, Klansmen, attorneys, and reporters. That storm eventually broke and faded, and the seven Carter children not only graduated from Drew High School but also went on to receive college degrees; by a nice historical irony, one daughter, Beverly, later served on the Drew School Board. Curry tells the Carters' modest story well, giving the reader a solid feel for the tenor of small-town Mississippi life in an era that now seems eons awayand for how difficult the Carters' persistence was each day for the children. (One of them recalls, ``Up until a few years ago, I was still having nightmares about being in Drew High School, and I would wake up sobbing.'') A solid contribution to the literature of recent American political history. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56512-095-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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