Angry and paranoid, with moments of stylistic clarity.
Long-winded but frequently beautiful memoir traces the author’s evolving identity, from childhood in upper-middle-class suburban Minneapolis to joining the desperate struggle against apartheid in South Africa and beyond.
Wilderson (African-American Studies and Drama/Univ. of California, Irvine) moves erratically through time. He begins with the startling moment in Johannesburg, where in 1995 he learned that Nelson Mandela believed he was a threat to national security. But soon we are hearing about his first visit to South Africa in 1989, when a journalist urged 33-year-old Wilderson to come and bear witness to apartheid. He worked for several years in the ’90s as a writer for the African National Congress, recording eyewitness accounts of violence against black people in the townships and sending them to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Wilderson was an outspoken, well-read Marxist given to lecturing the underground militants he worked under, namely white Trevor Garden and black activist Stimela Mosando, who ran guns and ideas for the ANC’s more radical arm. The author fell in love with and married a young law student named Khanya. They lived briefly in New York, but she disliked the covert racism she found there. Back in Johannesburg, they endured the violent repercussions of black politician Chris Hani’s 1993 assassination and were eventually torn apart by ideological discord. Alternating chapters cover Wilderson’s seismic awakening to racism in America as the child of one of the only black families in well-off Kenwood, Minn.; his adolescent activism in the ’60s; his studies in African literature at Dartmouth; his ten years as a stockbroker; his decision to become a teacher and writer. His account of a long affair with an older white academic provides perhaps more information than most readers will want, but it fits with Wilderson’s mission to be brutally honest with and about himself.
Angry and paranoid, with moments of stylistic clarity.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-89608-783-5
Page Count: 500
Publisher: South End Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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