A giddily conversational account of finding racial peace within.
Thin-on-ideas memoir by an African-American journalist who grew up in Milwaukee but discovered her authentic black self through her experiences in Spain.
An upper-middle-class suburban Midwesterner, Tharps was accused in school of “talking White” and not “acting like a real Black person was supposed to.” Though she was popular and made friends easily, she was keenly aware of slurs and latent prejudice. By seventh grade, Tharps was sure Spain was going to be her salvation. “I wasn’t just studying Spanish because I had to learn a language,” she writes. “I wanted access into another world when this one got to be too much.” Yet when she followed her sister into American Field Service (AFS), an exchange program that allowed her to spend a summer abroad, she opted to explore her African roots in Casablanca. (Apparently no one told her Moroccans are Arabs.) Elitist Smith College was another odd choice for finding her “Blacker side”; ignored at the first meeting of the Black Students’ Alliance, she left in tears. Resolved to become a “multiculturalist,” Tharps finally got to Spain for her junior year abroad in Salamanca, where she was referred to as la morena and received numerous marriage proposals. After a series of goofy, unsuitable Spanish boyfriends, she met Manuel in a German class; he visited her in Milwaukee, and they later got married. Tharps embarked on a career as a journalist and moved to New York; she and Manuel had two sons. Her memoir records moments of harassment while traveling into Spain wearing dreadlocks (“a big black moving target”) and her troubling visit to Manuel’s birthplace, Cádiz, which in the days of the Atlantic trade had been a transfer point for slaves, some of whom remained in bondage in Andalusia. Though Tharps comes to recognize how her own cultural identity (“Kinky”) intersects with the Spanish (“Gazpacho”), the journey she chronicles isn’t exactly heavy on intellectual insights.
A giddily conversational account of finding racial peace within.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9647-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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