The background is rich but the core is hollow in this memoir depicting a young African-American woman's coming of age in the precivil rights South. McDowell (English and African-American Studies/Univ. of Virginia) weaves a web of memories that focus on her early childhood years in the black working-class community of Birmingham, Ala., known as the Pipe Shop. While providing sundry details about herself and her family, a complete portrait of these never emerges. What is most successfully defined here is the marked difference between the Pipe Shop of the '50s and '60s and the one McDowell returns to in the '90s, as she pursues a lawsuit involving asbestos poisoning that may have killed her father years earlier. Despite infidelities, illnesses, racial discrimination, and lapses in employment, the lives led in the Pipe Shop of McDowell's childhood were marked by steadiness and endurance. Compared with what the last two decades have wreaked on the American black family, it was, according to the author, a time of wholesome innocence. ``Marijuana had not yet filtered into Pipe Shop. . . . In our adolescent minds, dope was right up there with `doing the nasty'—nice girls did neither, especially if they wanted to go to college and marry nice men.'' Thirty years later the town is no longer recognizable. Its aura of warmth and care has been replaced by desolation and haphazardness. With the decline of industry, most of the young people have left. The jobs done by black men—who were always underpaid and overlooked in promotions—are now done faster and better by new machinery. Those black males remaining in the Pipe Shop either deal drugs or live off their grandparents' Social Security checks. But glimpses into McDowell's emotions are sparse, even when she recounts an illegal abortion. Somewhat satisfying as social history, this narrative is less successful as personal memoir. (photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81449-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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