A florid yet thorough and compelling history of missionary work and the 19th-century African-American experience both in...
A sinuously nuanced pursuit of a Southern Christian missionary couple’s conflicted journey from slaveholding Savannah, Ga., to West Africa.
In the thoroughgoing fashion of his Bancroft Prize–winning Dwelling Place (2005), religion historian Clarke devotes enormous care to delineating every aspect of the world known to his protagonists: Jane Bayard, from Savannah, and John Leighton Wilson, from Black River, S.C. The two well-to-do products of white plantation culture had made a marriage of convenience in 1834 in order to fulfill their dream of embracing missionary work in Liberia, as part of the expanding evangelical work sponsored by the American Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches. It was brave and dangerous work, especially since the pernicious miasmas (malaria) had felled most of the other white missionaries who arrived. However, the Wilsons survived, even thrived, setting up missions and schools for the colonists and native peoples. Newly freed—some of Jane’s own slaves from the Gullah community had been offered the choice to make a new life in Liberia—the African-American colonists were often riven by dissension, prompting the Wilsons to move father south to Gabon to start another mission among the Mpongwe. Curiously, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, patriotism resolved the couple to return to the South, believing “that the question of liberty was at the heart of the crisis.” Clarke underscores the irony of their use of the word “liberty” (as in the liberty of the North “to impose its will on the South”): This wise couple, who had fought the international slave law and worked fervently to educate and uplift the freed slaves, emerged from the war’s devastation mystified but committed to a moribund “Southern way of life.”
A florid yet thorough and compelling history of missionary work and the 19th-century African-American experience both in America and abroad.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-00272-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
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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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