by Estella Conwill Májozo ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999
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
Share your opinion of this book
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Rebecca Stefoff
BOOK REVIEW
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
BOOK REVIEW
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
BOOK REVIEW
by Howard Zinn
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.