Soul-baring revelations acknowledge racism’s impact, but make no excuses for the author’s mistakes.
Debut memoir by an African-American whose youthful dedication to antiracist activism degenerated into criminal behavior and led to jail.
Hopkins literally wrote his way out of the Virginia State Penitentiary with articles for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and other publications. He makes it clear that his activism did not arise from direct personal experience of oppression; among the black families in the factory town of Danville, Va., his was middle-class and comfortable. Nonetheless, his penetrating recollections reveal, racism had a cumulative effect as the civil rights movement ratcheted up. For example, after being transferred to a new school under the federal minority busing mandate, he was relieved to discover that white kids were not innately superior: black students in the forefront of integration “lived with the subconscious fear that the lies of racial inferiority might indeed, in some small and unknown way, be damnably true.” His confrontations with prejudice were oblique but infuriating, as when he realized that whites often addressed him and his father as if they were the same age. In his early teens, Hopkins became involved with the Black Panther Party. Unfulfilled and infected with rage, he was later talked into committing an armed robbery—and he got caught. No one was killed or even injured, but the jury gave him a life sentence. In prison, consenting to read a poem he had written for an inmate group session, Hopkins was applauded for the first time in his life. He adopted writing as his “escape” methodology, even though another con warned that the example of fellow jailhouse author Jack Henry Abbott (who killed again after being sprung due to the efforts of Norman Mailer) would make this a difficult path out of prison. Freed 17 years later, Hopkins found that “love for a world of readers I continued to believe in” had finally conquered his rage.
Soul-baring revelations acknowledge racism’s impact, but make no excuses for the author’s mistakes.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4623-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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