A golden-hued, folksy account of a generous farming community.
Anecdotes and history of an East Texas town, with a corncob-pipe theme.
Nostalgia and old-fashioned community spirit rule in the series of anecdotes about the lives and times of the 150 farming and small-business people who lived in Fairdale, Texas. Its lifespan was little more than a century before it disappeared under the waters of the Toledo Bend Reservoir in the 1960s. Oglesbee (San Augustine County, 2010) portrays the town’s social, economic and daily life during the early 20th century, based on reminiscences of residents and their descendants. It was hard going splitting wood, plowing by mule, nurturing crops threatened by the vagaries of nature, tending cattle and worrying about feeding a large family. An iron will, a belief in God and a cheerful community spirit seemed to pull everyone through. Livestock and domestic animals were almost part of the family. Bossy, one family’s cow, had the habit of munching on wild onions and bitter weeds, which made her milk undrinkable. Old Devil, a mule, possessed a cantankerous spirit but reliably pulled the plow and did the heavy lifting around the farm. Snip and Goode, two faithful dogs, showed astonishing instinct in looking after a herd of cows one night when a farmer was too ill to move. Children grew up surrounded by nature, amusing and enjoying themselves, without any of the luxuries available to big-city families. Fairdale’s claim to lasting fame is a possible/probable link with Aaron Burr, the U.S. vice president under Thomas Jefferson. Oglesbee researched the link meticulously (many of the town’s inhabitants were named Burr). A question that arises in the mind of the cynical reader is whether all the folk in the town were so openhearted and full of good spirit. Not a breath of scandal touches the chronicle. “No one knows where this place is but God and us,” is the comment of one former citizen. That is about the best epitaph any small town can have.
A golden-hued, folksy account of a generous farming community.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484033272
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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