Life at the turn of the century in the lumber camps of the Mississippi Delta, as recalled by a woman pioneer who cooked for hundreds; raised a family; and, with humor and courage, overcame a host of daunting obstacles. Written on scraps of paper in the 1930's at the request of journalist Helen Dick Davis, who edited the manuscript, Mary Hamilton's autobiography was rejected by publishers who felt that the memoirs of a pioneering woman were of no interest. Fortunately, times have changed, and we can now appreciate this remarkable tale of a woman with little formal schooling but tremendous spirit and an intuitive wisdom. Raised in the wild country of Arkansas, Hamilton met her husband, the mysterious Englishman Frank Hamilton, at the boardinghouse she helped her widowed mother run. When her dying mother made her promise to marry Frank and to raise her younger brother and sister, Mary agreed—but ``to be honest, I admired him but I did not love him.'' Over the years, admiration turned to love, but Frank—who hinted at a distinguished background—never fully took Mary into his confidence; he also drank when under pressure, and, in the resulting binges, squandered the money Mary had saved. Her life was filled with work—she did everything from baking 115 loaves of bread a day to milking cows; with hardships—floods that destroyed her home in the camps, as well as a series of financial set-backs that ended her dream of having her own house; and with death—four of her nine children died in early childhood. Courageous, never self-pitying, Mary was quick to note the help of loyal friends; the loving support of her children; and the natural beauty of the Delta in which she lived. A salutary reminder of just what those too-often unremembered women did in opening up this country. A splendid and long overdue addition to the pioneering canon.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-87805-579-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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