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THE OUTSKIRTS OF HOPE

Name: THE OUTSKIRTS OF HOPE
Author: Jo Ivester
ISBN: 978-1631529641

A MEMOIR OF THE 1960S DEEP SOUTH

by Jo Ivester ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2015

An important, riveting history lesson that, unfortunately, is still relevant today.

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An articulate, poignant recollection of the almost two years Ivester and her family spent in the Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou during the turmoil of the civil rights movement.

“My parents were foot soldiers in President Johnson’s War on Poverty.” Thus begins Ivester’s debut, constructed from her writings and from journals kept by her mother, Aura Kruger. Ivester was only 10 when her father, a pediatrician in Newton, Massachusetts, decided to close his practice and relocate the white family to an all-black community in the rural South to open a much needed medical clinic. In August 1967, their three youngest children in tow, the Krugers moved into two trailers that would be their home until February 1969. While Leon focused on his new medical facility, Aura became a high school English teacher. With stark honesty, Aura’s writings reveal her anxieties and anger about uprooting her children and moving them into schools where they would be the only white students. She details the challenges of dealing with the Jim Crow laws still in effect in the South. The first time her students entered her classroom, they walked in silently, slowly, eyes cast down. “Many of these students had never seen a white person up close,” Ivester writes. “They’d been raised to fear white people, to always appear docile and unthreatening, to avoid eye contact.” Eventually, she was able to breach the color divide, using her class to introduce these teens to the writings of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver. Aura, more than anyone else in the Kruger family, found her voice and sense of purpose in Mound Bayou. Interspersed with Aura’s journal entries are black-and-white photos and recollected childhood writings from the author. Her young voice is haunting, reflecting confusion when she was teased for being Jewish and trauma when she was attacked and beaten by three older boys. What makes this book particularly valuable is its vivid depiction of the abhorrent consequences of legalized segregation. What gives it heart is the window it opens to the personal journeys of mother and daughter.

An important, riveting history lesson that, unfortunately, is still relevant today.

Pub Date: April 7, 2015

ISBN: 978-1631529641

Page Count: 238

Publisher: She Writes Press

Review Posted Online: May 4, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | UNITED STATES

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.