Evidence of a life most extraordinary.
From humble beginnings, Elsie Fox fought most of her adult life to ensure fairness and equality for all, even at the risk of her freedom.
Elsie’s life story is not an archetypal American tale. Born on a remote Montana ranch in 1907, she came from modest beginnings. She barely knew her birth father and lived with a stepfather that tried to sexually molest her–learning at a young age that she could not be beholden to a man to get by in the world. After finishing two years of college, Elsie entered the workforce full time. By the mid-1920s, she found a steady job as a secretary for an advertising agency in Seattle. As an independent woman, she took full advantage of the Jazz Age, going to speakeasies, dating various men and generally having a swell time. When the Great Depression hit, Elsie fumed at life’s unfairness. During one of the “bank holidays,” she found herself at the local library and happened upon The Communist Manifesto–she was radicalized that day, and fervently believed that the communist system was the only workable system. Elsie joined the party, which became her whole world, and her life began anew. She met her husband Ernest, another true believer, at a party meeting. In spite of the danger inherent in being a card-carrying communist, Elsie only stopped her active membership when she realized that the stories of Stalin’s purges weren’t merely capitalist propaganda but the truth. However, she still believed that as an economic system communism was the right path. What sets this biography apart is its subject–still alive as of the book’s 2008 publication, readers learn about modern-day Elsie, not just through the prism of history. They meet a scrappy older woman who is as passionate about her country and the rights of its inhabitants as she has ever been.
Evidence of a life most extraordinary.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-51856-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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