A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism—but remains too intensely subjective throughout to...
An intensely felt but highly personal account by an African-American academic of the journey she took from Christianity to Tibetan Buddhism—and back.
Raised in the 1950s in Docena, a small Alabama mining town, Willis attended segregated schools and was an outstanding student. While still in high school in Birmingham, she faced down Bull Connor’s attack dogs; later, at Cornell, she became involved in radical politics. Acutely aware of racial injustice and angry at white intimidation—the Klan once burned a cross outside the family home one evening while her father was working the graveyard shift in the mine—she had to decide, after graduating from Cornell in 1969, between joining the Black Panthers or studying Buddhism in Nepal. Although she felt it was her responsibility as a “thinking Black person” to join the radical group, her inner self rebelled and she went instead to Nepal (which she had visited the previous year while learning Sanskrit in India). In Nepal, studying Buddhism with a wise and perceptive Lama, she began to find herself at peace and better able to confront the stings of racism. When the Lama told here that living with pride and humility in equal proportions was very difficult, she understood at once that he had identified “one of the deepest issues confronting not only her, but all African Americans.” Back in the US she began teaching, got a Ph.D., and was granted tenure at Wesleyan (where she still teaches). Raised a Baptist, she has returned to her childhood faith and now calls herself a “Baptist-Buddhist.” Although she describes her parents with affection, the heart of her story is the account of her transforming encounter with Buddhism, which enabled her to overcome racism and practice the loving-kindness that Christianity demands.
A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism—but remains too intensely subjective throughout to rise above the level of personal memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-173-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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
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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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