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COME OUT THE WILDERNESS

MEMOIR OF A BLACK WOMAN ARTIST

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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