A heartfelt book from a mother who “will keep on talking and telling my story as long as people will listen.”
A mother’s plea for change after her son’s murder by police.
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was arrested for selling single cigarettes. During his arrest, he was choked by a New York City Police Department officer and later died. The video of his murder has been viewed millions of times, and his name has been added to a long list of other black Americans who have died needlessly at the hands of law enforcement officers. In this emotional memoir, Carr, Garner’s mother, shares the story of her son’s life leading up to the moment of his death, describing the type of child he was and the man he became and the aftermath of her own life after the tragedy. In straightforward, sometimes repetitive prose, she demonstrates how Garner’s death changed her from a passive grandmother content to work her job as a subway train operator to an “unplanned activist.” Slowly, she learned how to speak in front of large crowds and share her message with other parents who have experienced similar tragedies. “All across the country,” she writes, “people were relating to me and understanding and sharing their concern and condolences….It felt good being out of New York and finding that so many people felt the same way, that things had gotten out of hand and the police were going too far….There needed to be…better education and more accountability.” In that vein, she discusses the need for a “checks-and-balances system” within police forces across the country. As she gained recognition and a powerful voice, she became engaged in Hillary Clinton’s run for the White House and was invited to speak at a variety of events. (Clinton provides the foreword.) Along with her personal moments, Carr includes numerous pointers on how to become an activist and lessons she learned by trial and error, many of which will be useful for aspiring activists.
A heartfelt book from a mother who “will keep on talking and telling my story as long as people will listen.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5381-0980-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
