by Elizabeth Spencer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1998
A literary memoir that's part paean to the golden-age South and part unstinting critique of that region's corrupting segregation and cultural rigidity. Award-winning novelist Spencer (The Night Travellers, 1991, etc.) has led a peripatetic life, traveling widely in Europe and living for many years in Canada. But her hometown of Carrollton, Miss., remains a locus for both memory and fiction. She writes glowingly of a happy childhood in the 1920s and '30s, surrounded by a doting extended family and immersed in the genteel rhythms of plantation life. Early on, she realized the importance (and the constriction) of maintaining appearances in a society where orderliness and prescribed behavior were paramount. Her problems with authority and her budding noncomformity—expressed first in a love of books and writing and later in her support of desegregation—eventually led to estrangement from her father, a businessman who valued commerce above art and racial equality. Spencer's preference for remembering her hometown's nurturing goodness, rather than the flaws that drove her out, is illustrated by her refusal to revisit the decrepit remains of once-grand mansions inhabited by family and friends: ``Where Carrollton is concerned it seems a desecration to recognize that time exists at all.'' She does confront Mississippi's intransigence on race, recounting her horror over the Emmett Till murder and the inseparable divide it opened within her family. Tales of travel in Germany, Italy, France, and England (and her life as a published but impoverished writer in New York) paint a romantic picture of bohemian life. Literary friendships and encounters with Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Walker Percy, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and a memorably frosty William Faulkner are detailed in entertaining and vivid thumbnail characterizations. More than simply personal history, Spencer's self-portrait of her literary development dramatically personifies the high price the South paid for driving out its best and brightest. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45739-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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