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ON COON MOUNTAIN

SCENES FROM A CHILDHOOD IN THE OKLAHOMA HILLS

Autobiographical tales, told with elegant simplicity, of a boyhood spent among the rocky bluffs and woods of Cherokee country. Ross (Creative Writing/Central State Univ., Edmond, Oklahoma) was born in 1929 on an Oklahoma homestead above the slopes of a mountain named not after raccoons but after the original Cherokee owners. The author's mother, proud of her respectable Arkansas upbringing (she was one of a dozen children), maintained that Oklahoma was still Indian territory and ``only pretended to be a state to please the Federal government.'' His father, who quit school at 14 and worked five years in the Colombian oil fields for the money to buy the homestead from his grandfather, was a master farmer and coon hunter. (He once sold his favorite blue-tick hound for a year's income, but had to buy the dog back to keep peace in the family.) Ross himself is a master of the old American art of storytelling. His grandfather—Monroe Garrison—left home as a teenager, Ross tells us, to take up with a circuit-riding preacher. Garrison lived with the preacher and his nine children, married and started his own family in the same house, and cared for the aging preacher. A railroad line was put in 20 miles away, and by turning pigs into the woods, letting them multiply, and herding them out, Garrison and the preacher's sons made thousands, permitting Garrison to get his own home. Ross takes us coon- hunting on the mountain at night; foraging for forgotten treats- -possum grapes, black haws, hackberries, persimmons; and, along with his father and his farmer friends, working hard on the most infernal, labor-intensive machine ever made: the horse-drawn, hand-fed hay-baler. A marvelous evocation, related with Twain-like skill, of a recent past so utterly vanished as to seem ancient.

Pub Date: March 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-8061-2405-9

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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