by Gerald M. Boyd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2010
An important, culturally sensitive portrait of success, failure and atonement.
Posthumous memoir of the first African-American managing editor of the New York Times.
Boyd (1950–2006) was the youngest child in a poor St. Louis family, and his young mother died when he was three. The subsequent departure of his father caused the feelings of “fatalism” that would saturate his early adulthood. Raised by his stern yet loving grandmother, Boyd sought guidance and protection from his older brother, a cousin and, during his teens, the Coopers, a compassionate Jewish family. Through forced bussing and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Boyd emerged impassioned by writing and was awarded a scholarship to the University of Missouri, along with a copyboy job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As his confidence and professional acumen grew—along with his awareness of “openly racist attitudes and slights”—he fell in love with and married Sheila, a fellow writer. Though the marriage dissolved years later, Boyd’s career blossomed—first as a White House correspondent, followed by years of laborious, racially challenging ladder-climbing he calls “the ugly underside of life at the Times.” The author’s courageous fight for racial equality both inside and outside the workplace never ceased, and he smartly remarks that in America’s newsrooms, African-Americans “have been tolerated but rarely embraced.” Eventually the fact-heavy text becomes consumed with episodes of newsroom drama, including his love/hate relationship with the Times’ “pragmatic” executive editor Howell Raines. After remarrying and starting a family, Boyd’s bubble burst with his involuntary resignation following the fallout from the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003. Photographs and chapters prefaced by anecdotal commentary from peers and friends add integrity to a comprehensive, noteworthy memoir.
An important, culturally sensitive portrait of success, failure and atonement.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55652-952-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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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
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