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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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