Firsthand recollections of communal spirit enliven a sometimes-slow text.
A family history that digs deep into an isolated Appalachian mining community.
Debut author Frazer grew up in the small mining community of Minden, West Virginia, when coal was still king in Appalachia. At the time of the 1950 census, 28 percent of the male population of Fayette County was employed in the mines, including Frazer’s father. This book offers a thoroughly researched, if somewhat plodding, family history that fondly recalls the camaraderie—and grime—of life in an isolated coal camp. Waste from the mines, she writes, was “piled high” on the hillside behind her house, “letting off a burning, stinky smoke constantly hovering over Minden....I remember thinking that this must be what I hear others talk about as Hell.” The first half of the book painstakingly describes the emigration of her ancestors from central Europe, their early struggles as farmers in Virginia, and the impact of the Civil War. There are some interesting revelations here; for example, Frazer’s sixth removed grandfather, a former indentured servant, owned slaves, and her grandfather joined the Ku Klux Klan, apparently “as a constructive way to ensure the safety of his family.” But the book’s dearth of local color and context makes for heavy reading. Things pick up, however, once the author, one of seven children, takes center stage; her firsthand presence lends some immediacy to the mining-town memories. The family’s home, she says, was company property and “Company houses in Minden eventually changed colors from white to gray as the coal dust, soot, and burning slate settled on the homes.” The outdoor toilet served all nine family members and many days they took “a bucket or pail of water, soap and wash cloth to take a ‘spit bath.’ ” On one occasion, Frazer’s brothers dug a hole to where they believed a neighbor was storing moonshine: “they find no moonshine. They do discover a usable toilet.” The Minden mines closed in 1955 and none of Frazer’s family members now work in the industry. But in this memoir, she tells of how the mining life “will always be part of us. Those ties are too strong to break.”
Firsthand recollections of communal spirit enliven a sometimes-slow text.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7080-8
Page Count: 162
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
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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