Both personally and professionally, Májozo exemplifies the trials and triumphs of the African-American woman.
An evocative and eventful memoir of a remarkable black woman who made the arts her life and her life an artwork.
Born Estella Conwill in 1949, Majozo (African-American Literature/Hunter Coll.) grew up in Louisville, Ky., when it was still segregated; her first strong memory is of fighting between her brothers and neighboring whites. Her father fell to his death while helping a neighbor when the author was a child, and her mother had to work, but Estella tried hard at school, where she was the token colored student, required to be a credit to her race. When a youthful marriage went bad and her husband turned abusive, the devout Catholic spent years trying unsuccessfully to get the marriage annulled. The thoughtlessness of one sexist white priest finally provoked her to explode (though only after she—d left his presence): “I am sorry, Father, that the church is so stupidly insensitive to my situation! That it has never cared about my poor little Black female ass and still has the nerve to call itself the body of Christ, you jerk!” This is one of several occasions when the reader wants to get up and cheer, but most of Májozo’s victories are quiet ones: earning one of the first doctorates in African-American literature; founding and running Blackaleidoscope, an arts center in her hometown. Several passages in the book deal with the author’s oscillation between New York City, the historic mecca of African-American artists, and her dream of helping black culture thrive in Louisville. She drew sustenance from both places, moving back to New York in 1988 to teach at Hunter. Throughout, Májozo’s language is richly seasoned with allusions to both black literature and the Bible. Though her memoir chronicles some hard times, including a wrenching miscarriage, it also shows her moving on to new love and challenges.
Both personally and professionally, Májozo exemplifies the trials and triumphs of the African-American woman.Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55861-206-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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