A biography of—and tract on—Moses Fleetwood Walker, baseball's first black big-league star. Walker was born in 1857 to a modestly prosperous family living in the relatively liberal and integrated eastern Ohio town of Mount Pleasant. Had he never picked up a bat while a student at Oberlin College, he would probably still have been an estimable figure in African-American history: In addition to being a proficient catcher (the sporting tabloids of the day offered effusive, albeit grudging, praise for his defensive prowess), he was the holder of patents for an artillery shell prototype and several other inventions, as well as the author of Our Home Colony: The Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race in America, an influential treatise. However, the light-skinned Walker lived precariously along the fault lines of America's racial tensions—a fact that Zang, a freelance journalist and sports historian, makes clear in many heavy-handed passages throughout the book. He was a touchstone for the many white fears and suspicions that surfaced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often in the guise of pseudo- scientific studies. After baseball's 1889 interdict on blacks, Walker got into trouble—some of it incidental, some not. He was tried for homicide and acquitted, but he was not so lucky in a postal fraud case; he wrote Our Home Colony during his prison term. After that, Walker was a moderately successful entrepreneur until his death in 1924. Like many pioneering black figures, he has achieved greater recognition posthumously, receiving honors from Oberlin and elsewhere. During his life, it's clear that Moses Fleetwood Walker was as much the victim as the embodiment of the American Dream. Impassioned, but occasionally florid and meandering.
Pub Date: May 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-8032-4913-6
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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