A fine contribution to the literature of civil rights and the African American experience.
An alumnus of the Harvard class of 1963 recounts an experiment in affirmative action and its lasting effects.
Before 1959, the African American presence at Harvard was minimal to the point of being practically nonexistent. That year, the university recruited 18 young black men—women did not yet enter into the picture—one of them Garrett, who went on to excel in TV news and documentary-making. “I was by no means the first Black at Harvard,” he writes. “That was Richard Theodore Greener, who graduated in 1870. From then until the mid-twentieth century, there were sometimes one or two in a class, and often none.” The other 17 men were just as capable. In a kind of modern rejoinder to Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky’s What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? Garrett traces their lives and careers. All acknowledge that a Harvard education had its uses, but most also allow that during their student years, they kept quiet and did their work, careful not to give any reason to be forced out. Some of the former students are expatriates, having found other countries more congenial than the still racially troubled United States. One gentleman who has long lived in Austria after a career at IBM remembers going to student mixers and having classmates rush out to find a black girl for him to dance with: “There we were, the two of us, and all these whites just standing there glowing, saying ‘Isn’t it great?’ It was very embarrassing for her and for me.” Rueful reminiscence sometimes shades into anger, but for the most part, these extraordinary men chart life journeys that were full of challenges—as with a closeted gay classmate who went on to careers in the aerospace, banking, and advertising sectors—but also full of accomplishments. Garrett writes with an easy, charming style (“In the spring of 1962, I was still trying to climb the steep and slippery slope of organic chemistry”), but the sense of injustice is palpable.
A fine contribution to the literature of civil rights and the African American experience.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-87997-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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