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GROWING UP BLACK IN RURAL MISSISSIPPI

Name: GROWING UP BLACK IN RURAL MISSISSIPPI
Author: Jr. Archer
ISBN: 0-8027-1175-8

by Jr. Archer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1992

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A debut memoir that explores a little-known pocket of Americana: the experience of rural blacks in the Deep South during the Great Depression. For Archer, a professor (Student Development/Northern Virginia Community College) and newspaper columnist, childhood was composed of two worlds that tried never to meet. The inner world was the black family—and its extension, the local black community—where life was ``wrapped in a mystical haze'' of comfort and joy. In this cozy, ramshackle cosmos shone such eccentric stars as Uncle Perry, the kindly Baptist minister; Uncle Nick, an enterprising smith, potter, cook, and carpenter; and Mama Jane, an aunt who tended to judge people by the lightness of their skin. Working with the Mississippi soil, folk remedies, ingenious foods (there's a recipe here for walnut-cider rice), and the spiritual cement of the local church, blacks built a bulwark against the outer world: the ever- threatening presence of Klan lynchings, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, grinding poverty, inadequate medical care, indifferent education. Chalmers comes of age in the inner world, acquiring there the values that sustain him in adulthood; concurrently, a second education takes place, as he grows aware of the outer world, sometimes in scenes of shocking violence, and of the ways in which black self-sufficiency can chain the dogs of racism. Built of plain, poignant anecdotes, this lacks dazzle but shines with tenderness, and succeeds admirably in the author's intention ``to fill a gap in black history.'' (Twenty-five b&w photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-8027-1175-8

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Walker

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY

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1915

THE DEATH OF INNOCENCE

by Lyn Macdonald ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 1995

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A harrowing account of the first full year of WW I, a watershed span during which it dawned on the British and their allies that global war was not a glorious adventure but a deadly serious business. In recounting the military events of 1915 from the standpoint of the British Empire, historian Macdonald makes effective use of first-person recollections from surviving Tommies and their Commonwealth comrades in arms, who were at the sharp end of the bayonet on battlegrounds from Flanders to Gallipoli. Including just enough big-picture background to keep major campaigns and offensives in perspective, she provides an affectingly clear picture of what it meant to face German artillery, machine guns, and poison gas in the muddy trenches of the Western Front or to endure the withering fire of Turks defending the high ground above the strategic Dardanelles. Macdonald also makes a fine job of documenting how the bloody realities of close-quarters combat transformed eager volunteers into hard-bitten veterans with precious few illusions about their lethal lot. Beyond reckoning the human costs of what folly turned into a soldier's (not a commander's) conflict, she assesses the impact of the annihilating, stalemated struggle on those who remained home, perhaps making dressings for the local hospital, and anxiously awaiting news of their boys. While horrific losses helped strengthen Great Britain's resolve, many parallels may be drawn between 1915's brutal events and America's rude awakening in 1968, when demonstrators as well as news dispatches forcibly reminded the nation that its sons were being slaughtered in places both geographically and culturally remote. An estimable, resonant contribution to the WW I record, one which leaves no doubt that innocence as well as truth is among the first casualties when war comes to stay. (32 pages of photos, not seen; 20 maps)

Pub Date: Jan. 10, 1995

ISBN: 0-8050-3499-4

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | HISTORY

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STRAIGHT SEX

RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE

by Lynne Segal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1994

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A fresh and welcome feminist perspective on the place and value of heterosexual sex in society. Segal (Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, not reviewed) takes a stand against writers like Andrea Dworkin who, claiming to speak for feminism, portray heterosexuality as inevitably incompatible with women's interests. Beginning with a long history of the sexual revolution of the `60s, Segal notes that, since then, straight feminists have been less vocal than their lesbian counterparts about the pleasures of sex. As Segal sees it, that silence was a defensive response to a larger social backlash against changing gender roles and the growing economic and political power of women, which caused male anxiety about threats to masculinity. Any rethinking of heterosexuality, according to Segal, must confront and reconcile images that equate active sex with male and passive with female. In fact, she writes, ``what men want, as often as not, is to be sexually passive.'' To assume that all heterosexual sex as constructed in a male-dominated society essentially affirms manhood and therefore cannot be truly pleasurable for straight women is to deny the agency and pleasure available to women. Segal believes that achieving gender equality requires ``the success of feminist goals on all fronts, with the assertion of women's sexual autonomy but one factor among many,'' as well as the ``mutual recognition of similarities and differences between women and men, rather than upon notions of their opposition.'' Born in Australia and with a great deal of knowledge of Britain, Segal's investigation offers insight into the constructions of sexuality beyond the borders of the US, giving greater weight and evidence to her claims about heterosexual pleasures. Segal's analysis begins to fill a tremendous void in the literature and will be a welcome change to depressing and damaging stereotypes that depict all men as savage sexual beings and women as unwitting victims.