by Jacquelyn Hester Colleton-Akins Elbert Akins Jr. ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 4, 2016
A disorderly mélange of remembrances that won’t pique the attention of a broad audience.
Colleton-Akins (My Experience, 2017, etc.) recollects the religiously infused lessons received from her father and writes about them with co-author and husband, Akins.
In 1978, while Colleton-Akins was attending college in Florida, her father (who is unnamed in the book) fell ill and invited her to visit. He requested that she bring a tape recorder to immortalize a series of wide-ranging lessons that began with and focused on the history of the Israelites, beginning with the Book of Genesis. Her father taught her that gentiles had suppressed those sections highlighting the special election of the Israelites by God, whose true name is Yahawah. Much of the biblical history he related corresponds to the conventional version, but there were notable deviations. For example, he said the existence of the white race dates back to the birth of albinos in Noah’s family line. Unhappy with their pigmentation, angels transformed them into Caucasians. He told his daughter that Lucifer not only tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden with forbidden fruit, but also tricked her into having sex with him. He recounted personal memories as well—overcoming alcohol addiction and protecting her from two strange men who repeatedly tried to steal her. Some of the tales are morbidly dark and presented almost parenthetically; for example, when the author was a young child, her godmother poisoned her milk with kerosene. With the exception of the biblical history, the remembrance is meandering and disjointed—the author’s father jumped without transition from biblical exegesis to tales of the Atlantic slave trade to a short biography of Harriet Tubman. He made macabre predictions about the imminent appearance of the Antichrist as well as the ensuing end of the world. The work is a loving homage to Colleton-Akins’s father, whom she obviously both adored and respected deeply. However, the prose is awkward and leaden, and many of the lessons seem out of place here: “The male, testosterone hormones, is the male trait to produce healthy sperm and to have an erection for pleasure.” Further, the author’s recollections are so idiosyncratically religious they’re unlikely to appeal to readers who don’t share her eschatological convictions.
A disorderly mélange of remembrances that won’t pique the attention of a broad audience.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9799344-6-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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