McBride's mother should take much pleasure in this loving if sometimes uncomfortable memoir, which embodies family values of...
An eloquent narrative in which a young black man searches for his roots—against the wishes of his mother.
McBride, a professional saxophonist and former staff writer for the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, grew up with 11 siblings in an all-black Brooklyn, New York, housing project. As a child, he became aware that his mother was different from others around him: She was white, and she kept secrets. When asked where she was from, McBride recalls, she would say something like ``God made me''; when asked about her ethnicity, she would say, `` `I'm light-skinned,' and change the subject.'' No amount of prodding could get her to say much more, and McBride was left to explore his mother's past without much help from his principal subject. What he learned occupies the pages of this vivid, affecting memoir: the story of a woman whose parents fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of Central Europe for the American South, there to be faced with new prejudices and develop a few of their own; a woman whose father sexually abused her for years and who ``would run down the back roads where the black folks lived'' to escape him; a woman who moved to New York, married a black minister, and raised eight children, then remarried on his death and raised four more. ``My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right,'' McBride writes. The catalogue of his siblings with which he closes his book bears him out: Most have gone on to be doctors, educators, and professionals, with résumés of unbroken success.
McBride's mother should take much pleasure in this loving if sometimes uncomfortable memoir, which embodies family values of the best kind. Other readers will take pleasure in it as well.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1996
ISBN: 1-57322-022-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that...
A man who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit tells his shocking story.
Born in 1947 in the “Negro” wing of a New Orleans hospital, Woodfox helped his family eke out survival through petty crimes. Though he showed academic potential, he left high school before graduation, spending his time on streets patrolled by mostly white police officers, who “came through our neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men.” Arrested at 18, the author entered Angola penitentiary, where his defiance and his affiliation with a nonviolent chapter of the Black Panther Party led to racist, sadistic guards targeting him. When a white prison guard was mysteriously murdered while on duty, prison officials framed Woodfox for the killing despite his detailed presentation of evidence that another inmate had committed the crime. The bulk of the book chronicles the author’s solitary confinement over the next 40 years. In many cases, inmates subjected to these brutal conditions slowly lose their sanity and sometimes commit suicide. Woodfox explains how he overcame those odds despite relentless despair. Through a series of unusual occurrences, public-interest lawyers and other prison reformers learned about his treatment. The activists began building a two-pronged case, advocating for a declaration of innocence regarding the murder and seeking an end to Woodfox’s solitary confinement. Though the author is obviously not an impartial source, that understandable bias mingles throughout the narrative with fierce intelligence and the author’s touching loyalty to fellow prisoners also being brutalized. Nearly every page of the book is depressing because of the inhumane treatment of the prisoners, which often surpasses comprehension. But it’s an important story for these times, and readers will cheer the author’s eventual re-entry into society.
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2908-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.
New York Times columnist Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, 2011, etc.) returns with another volume that walks the thin line between self-help and cultural criticism.
Sandwiched between his introduction and conclusion are eight chapters that profile exemplars (Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne are textual roommates) whose lives can, in Brooks’ view, show us the light. Given the author’s conservative bent in his column, readers may be surprised to discover that his cast includes some notable leftists, including Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, and A. Philip Randolph. (Also included are Gens. Eisenhower and Marshall, Augustine, and George Eliot.) Throughout the book, Brooks’ pattern is fairly consistent: he sketches each individual’s life, highlighting struggles won and weaknesses overcome (or not), and extracts lessons for the rest of us. In general, he celebrates hard work, humility, self-effacement, and devotion to a true vocation. Early in his text, he adapts the “Adam I and Adam II” construction from the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Adam I being the more external, career-driven human, Adam II the one who “wants to have a serene inner character.” At times, this veers near the Devil Bugs Bunny and Angel Bugs that sit on the cartoon character’s shoulders at critical moments. Brooks liberally seasons the narrative with many allusions to history, philosophy, and literature. Viktor Frankl, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Tillich, William and Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf—these are but a few who pop up. Although Brooks goes after the selfie generation, he does so in a fairly nuanced way, noting that it was really the World War II Greatest Generation who started the ball rolling. He is careful to emphasize that no one—even those he profiles—is anywhere near flawless.
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9325-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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