A distinguished memoir as well as an important contribution to black cultural history.
Television writer/producer Fales-Hill recalls her mother, a Haitian-American musical legend who gave up her career for marriage, in one of those rare tributes that capture exactly what made someone widely loved and admired.
Mixing family history with her own recollections, the author begins with her parents’ marriage in 1958. Josephine Premice, the Brooklyn-bred daughter of well-born and cultured Haitians, was appearing in the musical Jamaica when she met wealthy WASP Timothy Fales, an iconoclast who loved literature and reading but left Harvard to go to sea. The two married and moved to Rome; Josephine gave up her career to become a devoted mother. The couple knew everybody from Harry Belafonte to Richard Burton, and when they moved back to New York in 1963, their home became a lively salon for black and white intellectuals and actors. The children went to a French school and spent summers on the Fales family estate. These idyllic times ended in 1985, the year Susan graduated from Harvard, when her father moved to Paris and took up with the first in a succession of other women. Josephine stayed home putting on a brave front. Despite bad breaks, she strove to be upbeat, well-dressed, and “semper fabulous”; in the late ’90s, she turned her own mother’s death from emphysema into a performance worthy of the greatest diva. The author affectingly describes all the good and bad moments. Her poignant tale of an unusual woman and an unusual marriage also quietly but eloquently indicts blacks and whites who continue to think stereotypically. At Harvard, Fales-Hill was called an “incognegro” by black students because she associated with whites; Josephine, who had a stellar resume, was by the 1980s considered too elegant and well-spoken for TV movies that wanted fat black women talking trash.
A distinguished memoir as well as an important contribution to black cultural history.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052356-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
