An eloquently told story that should make an impact.
A distinguished African American attorney’s account of how growing up in the Jim Crow South impacted her later struggle to overturn desegregation laws.
Segregation was a hard fact of life for African Americans when North Carolina native Roundtree (1914-2018) was a child. Undaunted, her mother pushed her and her sisters to become “women of destiny” by pursuing their educations. The author excelled in school and was accepted to Spelman College in Atlanta. After a short stint teaching, she traveled to Washington, D.C., where she went to work for Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, who recommended her for the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Roundtree took her first stand against racism while in the military when she successfully spoke out against Army plans to segregate the WAAC. At the end of the war, she was offered a position with the Fair Employment Practices Committee in California. She had initially wanted to go to medical school, but she soon came to realize that a law degree would best serve her desire to “chang[e] the world in which I’d come of age.” Roundtree attended Howard University School of Law and then began the legal work that would lead to the eventual “shattering of Jim Crow.” In 1955, she won a major victory in the Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company case, which helped bring about the end of the separate-but-equal practices that had been at the heart of segregation laws. Her law practice thrived, but a period of ill health and “nagging restlessness” caused her to turn to her religion for solace. Later, she enrolled in the Howard University Divinity School and became one of the first ordained female ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a leading light in “yet another war, a war for [abused] children.” Thoughtful and highly inspiring, this book, co-authored by McCabe, is not only a moving memoir; it is also an important contribution to the history of civil rights in America. Tayari Jones provides the foreword.
An eloquently told story that should make an impact.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-955-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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