A fascinating private dispatch from the front lines, full of insights into a time of historic social change.
Taylor Gibbs’ (Social Welfare, Emerita/Univ. of California, Berkeley; Children of Color: Psychological Interventions with Culturally Diverse Youth, 2003, etc.) comprehensive memoir gives an account of a remarkable family of political and civil rights activists during one of the most socially turbulent times in our nation’s history.
Born to prominent black Baptist minister Julian Taylor and his wife, Margaret, Taylor Gibbs grew up in a large family that included not only her own siblings, but also several troubled foster children. Living in relative economic privilege in predominantly white New England, both of Taylor Gibbs’ parents were nevertheless deeply committed to political and social justice issues, campaigning for high-profile Democratic politicians and working extensively with the NAACP. Firmly entrenched in the civil rights movement, Taylor Gibbs and her family came to know and work alongside an astonishing number of political luminaries and activists—Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, a young Martin Luther King Jr. (who took Taylor Gibbs to church several times after their fathers met at the National Baptist Convention), Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Clintons (the author’s son Geoffrey was an aide to Bill Clinton during his time as governor of Arkansas) and the Obamas. Academic as well as civic-minded, Taylor Gibbs attended Radcliffe College to study sociology before going on to pursue graduate degrees in social welfare and a doctorate in clinical psychology. With her exhaustive academic and real-world experience, Taylor Gibbs brings a unique perspective to issues of social justice, women’s rights and racial equality, as well as their often complicated points of intersection. For instance, she candidly recalls visiting Thurgood Marshall, a close family friend, to ask for a summer internship in the NAACP, for which she was more than amply qualified. His condescension toward her, punctuated with a pat on the rump as she was leaving, provides a testament to the increased difficulties faced by ambitious women of color.
A fascinating private dispatch from the front lines, full of insights into a time of historic social change.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497348462
Page Count: 468
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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