A sharply etched memoir of the struggle for civil rights.
In a disquieting and timely memoir, civil rights lawyer and activist Jelinek recounts candidly his experiences in the South, from 1965, when he arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, to work for the ACLU, until 1968, when he left for California to rethink his future. Intending to stay in Mississippi for only three weeks, Jelinek experienced what he calls “the ‘Mississippi High’: the intoxication felt by white middle class civil rights workers who suddenly found themselves thrust into the idealism of the civil rights cause.” Warmly welcomed by sharecroppers and the activist community, he was shocked by the racism and corruption among judges, lawyers, and all-White juries, and he recalls in chilling detail many instances of personal and professional peril. During the time Jelinek spent in the South, the civil rights community began to split between those who believed in slow, incremental change and those who advocated taking to the streets. “Militant Black Pride philosophy spread” after Stokely Carmichael—a man the author came to admire and respect—delivered his Black Power speech, drowning out “the sweet multi-racial sentiments of civil rights anthems,” and inciting “harsh separatist rhetoric.” In 1966, when Jelinek moved to Selma to head an ACLU office, he found deep rivalries: “[A] racial scorecard was needed to track all the players: Black v. Black, White v. White, Black v. White, SNCC v. SCLC and Sheriff Jim Clark’s people against just about everyone.” Finally, after being fired by the ACLU for tactics the organization deemed unprofessional, Jelinek founded the Southern Rural Research Project, focused solely on providing food to hungry, malnourished Black families. After he returned to California, he felt a profound loss of purpose and camaraderie until he found a like-minded community in the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.
A sharply etched memoir of the struggle for civil rights.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64336-118-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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
An intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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