An important document of the struggles (and triumphs) faced by African-American journalists from the 1960s until today.
Affecting memoir by an African-American journalism pioneer focused on racial and gender equality.
Retired Washington Post reporter and columnist Gilliam (Paul Robeson: All American, 1976) looks back on her distinguished career, during which she helped spur diversity in the media, beginning in an era when such change seemed nearly impossible. “I saw myself,” she writes, “as one of the new-style, aggressive black Americans moving up in Washington and elsewhere [and] I immediately faced prejudice outside and inside the tension-filled newsroom.” Gilliam (b. 1936) was the first black woman journalist hired at the Post, and though some colleagues reached out, the author amply shows the surreal, hurtful quality of social segregation in the early 1960s. Before that, she experienced Jim Crow during a childhood in Memphis and Louisville; her father’s occupation as a pastor showed her both poverty and an aspiration for knowledge and success. In the book’s most powerful section, Gilliam narrates her experiences covering infamous civil rights flashpoints, including recollections of white supremacist mob violence: “As a Southerner, I knew Mississippi was a land of black death, but I went anyway.” After a hiatus, during which she raised children with the artist Sam Gilliam, she received an offer from Ben Bradlee to come back to the Post, which was then being questioned for its lack of diversity. “As a black person,” she writes, “I had been fighting racial discrimination in the media for more than a decade.” Gilliam remained at the Post until 2013 and then immersed herself in efforts to bring young people of color into the media. The author writes with an acute sense of the historical significance of her career and the changes she witnessed, and she forcefully demonstrates the continuing crisis regarding people of color in mainstream journalism. Only occasionally does the narrative become repetitive or tiresome, but on the whole, the pages turn easily.
An important document of the struggles (and triumphs) faced by African-American journalists from the 1960s until today.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5460-8344-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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