Despite the wade through Deacon's (American Studies/Univ. of Texas, Austin) dense writing and disheveled timeline, Elsie Clews Parsons's story shines through. A feminist and anthropologist active in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, she consistently challenged the prevailing ideas and prejudices of her time. Parsons, a well-educated member of New York's upper class, drew her feminist ideas from her extensive studies of sociology and anthropology. Deacons chronicles Parsons's professional career as a groundbreaking ethnographer, detailing her ``modernist'' theories, her fieldwork in the Southwest, and her impact on the anthropological community. Her numerous published papers focused on dissecting and revamping cultural norms, from marriage to sex and birth control, all with the aim of spurring social change for women. Her professional career was balanced by an equally active personal life full of adventures, children, and romances, though Parsons carefully kept this life separate from her professional labors. WW I served as a turning point for Parsons, sending her off into new areas of research. A pacifist appalled by the ``melting pot'' acculturation propaganda preached by Woodrow Wilson, and by the racial intolerance that increased with the onset of the war, she immersed herself in understanding the culture of the Pueblo people of the Southwest, where she at last found serenity. (She continued her trips to the Southwest for anthropological research until her death in 1941.) After the war ended, Parsons returned to New York, where she resumed teaching and publishing, and worked to encourage aspiring social scientists. While Parsons's story is a remarkable one, Deacon views her subject as a ``carrier of culture'' in the new modernist era and thus continually interrupts her narrative to cram in extensive, and rather dry, academic explanations of her subject's anthropological theories and her influences, making for an uneven portrait of a remarkable figure. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-226-13907-7
Page Count: 517
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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