A dark and disturbing read.
The one-time assistant chief of staff of the Black Panther Party recounts his metamorphosis from urban guerilla to urban planner.
Forbes, now the chief strategic officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in New York, gives a vivid picture of the ethos of the black liberation movement and the alienation of black youth. He was first attracted to the Black Panthers when his older brother, a UCLA student, brought the party’s newspaper home with him to San Diego, where Forbes, a high-school drop-out, had felt the brunt of racial discrimination. In tune with its goal of ending police brutality, he joined the party at age 16 and was soon selling its newspaper on the street in the Bay Area. From there he moved up to the party’s ministry of information, and by age 20, he had become the party’s head of security, maintaining and distributing weapons. His personal choice was a 9-mm Browning automatic pistol, worn on an inside belt holster, but he also kept a riot shotgun and a Colt 45 close at hand. When his plan to kill a witness against Huey Newton went awry, leaving one Black Panther dead and Forbes wounded, he fled the Bay Area and went underground, living in various cities under various aliases. After some years as a fugitive, Forbes shed the persona of an angry, gun-toting police-hater and made the decision to turn his life around. Returning to California in 1980, he turned himself in, stood trial for felony murder and was convicted. Forbes used his time in prison to earn college credits; he was released in 1985. At 37, armed with a graduate degree, he took his first paying job as an adult. When writing of his life within the Black Panther Party and of his time behind bars, he uses black street jargon freely, lending this some added authenticity. An appendix provides a chronology of the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party.
A dark and disturbing read.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7434-8266-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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