A striking memoir of a gifted black woman's lonely, difficult, and unsatisfying climb to the heights of American power and...
Parker candidly addresses issues of race, gender and the true meaning of privilege for herself and for society at large.
By objective accounts, Parker (These Same Long Bones, 1994) was a success. Educated at the preppie Kent School, followed by college at Radcliffe and law school at New York University, she was employed first by a prestigious New York law firm and later by American Express. Yet her professional life seemed empty, her goals questionable. The story sounds familiar, but Parker's has unusual elements: She is both female and black, and as she considers her experiences, these two factors clearly form the core of her outlook. In one of the most moving and painful lines of this extraordinary memoir, Parker bluntly assesses her situation at the old-boys' law firm: "I carried the taint of the field and the bedroom.'' Trespassing grips the reader immediately with an evocative chapter on Parker's upbringing in the thriving middle-class black community of Durham, NC. There Parker took life's lessons from her grandmothers. One taught her that "money gives you freedom that not even white people can take away''; the other, that intelligence was a sharp, infinitely useful instrument, good for dealing with whites, who, as she put it, "never expected colored people to have any brains.'' For the next 25 years, these lessons form Parker's creed. Success, fueled by rage and resentment, comes readily, and it is not until her first "failure'' that Parker steps back to question herself. While she understands the value of her achievement, rage alone, she recognizes, can't sustain her, and it exacts a deep personal and social price. Parker's questioning of success motivated solely by racial (or other collective) concerns constitutes Trespassing's most important contribution. (For another take on black women's rage, see Jill Nelson, Straight, No Chaser.)
A striking memoir of a gifted black woman's lonely, difficult, and unsatisfying climb to the heights of American power and prestige.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-82297-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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