An unflinching memoir that offers vital American history.
Debut author Jackson recounts incidents of sexual harassment, revealing the generational wounds that the #MeToo movement seeks to heal.
“There are all sorts of books about accomplished corporate women who are confident, powerful, one of the boys, and for whom everything goes well,” the author writes at the beginning of this memoir. “But that was not my life.” Jackson presents painful memories of corporate America between the 1970s and 2010s. Her story begins with a traditional ’50s childhood, during which, she says, her submissive mother kept house for her engineering-professor father. “I didn’t want my mother’s life of fear, abuse, subservience, and catering to him,” she remembers. “I wanted his life—my own money, a job where I was important, away from the house.” Jackson had a desire to study biology in college—a prospect that no adults in her life encouraged, despite her 4.0 GPA—and to enter a science-related field. However, she says that as she started her career, men worked together to sabotage her—picking on her for made-up infractions, demanding sexual favors, or blaming her for their mistakes. When a higher-up decreed that he wouldn’t promote workers who didn’t have doctorates, she went back to school, only to encounter more harassment from professors, she says. Jackson goes on to share how she fought against various injustices, including age and sex discrimination. In separate sections in each chapter, she analyzes specific social and political advancements in the United States and relates them to her own life; this can feel a bit tedious as a narrative device, but it’s also useful in tracing the overall rise of feminist consciousness. References to Anita Hill’s 1991 U.S. Senate testimony and the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh emphasize the relevance of the author’s story today: “Twenty-seven years later, we were in a time warp,” she laments while reflecting on the Kavanaugh hearings. Jackson’s commiseration with younger generations of women is particularly touching when she tells of how two of her own sons were accused of sexual harassment.
An unflinching memoir that offers vital American history.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-662-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
