Politically compelling, yet frustratingly unrevealing as memoir.
An inspiring—though often too distant—autobiography of an activist and the intellectual and political movements that have engaged her.
Boggs, a Chinese-American born in 1915, began political life as a Marxist. Married to Black Power leader Jimmy Boggs for 40 years, she became inextricably intertwined with African-American struggles. She spent years as a disciple of the West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James, breaking with him in the 1960s; she and Jimmy had serious theoretical disagreements with him, and James seems to have been unwilling to engage in substantive dialogue. Today Boggs is in her 80s and still active in human-rights struggles, specifically in grass-roots movements to rebuild Detroit—from the struggle to end youth violence to community gardens to the multiracial environmental movement. She frequently discusses the need for radicalism to adapt to the realities of its time, and her life provides an edifying example: She espoused socialism at mid-century, Black Power in the '60s, and local community activism in the '80s and '90s. But this memoir suffers from historical vagueness on points that would have been easy enough to research; she doesn't remember which newspaper or which writer reported a particular event, or she qualifies accounts of public events with phrases like ``if I recall correctly.'' Boggs's preoccupation with the political at the expense of the personal is somewhat refreshing. But she goes overboard, giving her emotional life almost comically short shrift; when African Gold Coast politico Kwame Nkrumah writes, asking her to marry him and come to Africa, she notes, ``As I recall I declined because I couldn't imagine myself being politically active in a country where I was totally ignorant of the history, geography, and culture.'' Was that the only reason? She leaves us with no idea whether she even liked the guy.
Politically compelling, yet frustratingly unrevealing as memoir.Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8166-2954-5
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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