An appropriate tribute to the men who died and a fitting appreciation of the neighborhood they so distinguished.
Associated Press news executive Wilson looks at a single block in Silvis, Ill., and the families who sacrificed their sons to combat deaths in World War II and Korea.
Little understood in America, the Mexican Revolution accounted for millions of deaths between 1910 and 1920 and the emigration of another million Mexicans to the United States. A sizable community ended up in Silvis, working for the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, living in boxcars, weathering the Great Depression and enduring numerous violent labor-management disputes. Many of the families later moved to Second Street—an area of town known as Little Mexico—and from this tight-knit pocket of poverty they sent their sons to war. Out of the 78 who served, eight died, likely “the most from any single block in America.” All of the boys were indifferently schooled, most of them boxed a little, all shared a fierce patriotism. Notwithstanding his dogged interviewing, Wilson never quite fleshes out each of these cruelly foreshortened lives. Taken together, however, the stories deal less with individuals and with war than they do with a special community. Wilson successfully ties together the history of the refugee families with the history that their children helped to make in faraway battlefields in Europe and Asia. Little Mexico’s surviving soldiers returned to a country where bigotry and prejudice against Hispanics was still widespread. That prejudice lasted until the late ’60s, when local officials finally agreed that Second Street embodied something quite remarkable, a level of service and sacrifice worthy of the designation “Hero Street.”
An appropriate tribute to the men who died and a fitting appreciation of the neighborhood they so distinguished.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4012-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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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