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 Its aura of warmth and care has been replaced by desolation and haphazardness.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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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