An engagingly written mix of research, reportage, and memoir, infused with the passion of discovery.
A poet and professor comes to terms with her Native American heritage.
Though many tribes have been better able to sustain a collective identity—whether on a reservation or through perpetuation of their legacy—Low (Jackalope, 2015, etc.) never knew much about her Delaware (Lenape) heritage when she was growing up in Kansas. When the Delaware “sold” Manhattan to the Dutch in 1626, many of them dispersed in various directions, sometimes in different clans (“Wolf, Turkey, and Turtle”), but they retained no sustained tribal identity. Low’s mother rarely acknowledged that bloodline and showed disfavor toward the daughter who so resembled her grandfather. “Discrimination against Native people has been so fierce that many people, like my family, suppressed their identity with non-Europeans as completely as possible,” she writes. “Some black Cherokees chose to identify with African Americans because it was easier.” As the former poet laureate of Kansas and a dean at the Haskell Indian Nations University, she found herself traveling around the state, hearing stories from those with similar backgrounds. She became even more curious about the legacy that seemed lost, the history her family never spoke about, the one it had tried to hide, to marry above, to leave dead in the past. “This process has healed me,” she writes, allowing her to deepen the sort of relationship with her mother that they’d never had when the latter was living, to discover just how much in common she had with her grandfather, and to realize how those earlier had suffered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and discrimination in general. “The story of my grandfather and my mother has become my own, as my past grows longer than my future,” she writes.
An engagingly written mix of research, reportage, and memoir, infused with the passion of discovery.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9493-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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