Pays thoughtful tribute to a woman who believed in spiritual and educational empowerment.
Meticulously balanced if dry account of the Catholic nun who turned a down-and-out Belfast school for girls into one of the best in Europe.
Sister Genevieve didn’t initially want to be a teacher; she joined the Sisters of Charity so she could work out in the world with the poor. Impressed with her talents for organization and leadership, her superiors sent her in 1956 to the new St. Louise’s Catholic School for Girls, and she soon became its principal. The students were slum kids from large families; fathers were often unemployed, mothers working in the linen mills the sole providers. Sister Genevieve was determined that their daughters should have better lives and jobs. Not every family supported her: during the tense years of the Troubles in the late ’60s and ’70s, some parents accused her of being a sellout to the British and the local Protestant authorities; and even in the 1980s she had to contend with objections from the family of a girl who won a scholarship to Cambridge that attending a university was a waste of time and money. British educator Rae persuasively shows that the headmistress saw her paramount duties as being first to God and then to her girls. She did what she could to help families affected by violence as some students joined the IRA, others had relatives in prison or killed by the British army. The reactionary, controlling, and condescending male diocese was almost as challenging to deal with as the IRA and the British. Born in 1923 in the Irish Republic, Sister Genevieve sympathized with the militants but wanted St. Louise’s to be a haven of peace and normality where the girls could continue to get an education. She constantly exhorted her students not to get caught up in the ghetto mentality that espoused violence and to always stand up for themselves.
Pays thoughtful tribute to a woman who believed in spiritual and educational empowerment.Pub Date: March 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-52824-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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