Beals had one story to tell, and she told it five years ago in her award-winning Warriors Don—t Cry. Elvis was all the rage. Eisenhower was the president. Women wore crinolines, and blacks and whites snarled at one another from a safe, segregated distance. After making history more than 40 years ago as one of nine students to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, all else may have appeared pretty pedestrian for Beals. Or so it would seem. The memoirist reports in this sequel to Warriors Don—t Cry that the reason she never completed her studies at Central High was a fluke: She had been tipped off to danger by an unlikely source. That source, a fair-skinned cousin passing for white, had risen to some prominence in the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the word among his fellow Klansmen was that death would come to the five students who remained at the school if they insisted on getting an integrated education. Beals fled to Santa Rosa, a small town near San Francisco, where she completed her segregated education, albeit in more friendly surroundings. Most striking in her account is how life changed for her after moving to the coast. She fell in love with a white man, and though adjusting to the North posed its own set of problems, she seems to have found the close equivalent of domestic bliss: “I began losing weight. I no longer craved junk food to fill the empty spot in my soul.” But she avoided political activism at all costs. The Black Panthers; the free speech movement on several college campuses at the time—none of that attracted her. Little Rock had been enough. She settled into a private life of marriage, separation, welfare, and then divorce. Later, she claimed a new life as a journalist—making this an account of the fairly routine stuff of a black woman coming of age in the North.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14464-1
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For the author’s fans.
A Fox News journalist and talk show host sets out to prove that she is not “an empty St. John suit in five-inch stiletto heels.”
The child of devout Christians, Minnesota native Carlson’s first love was music. She began playing violin at age 6 and quickly revealed that she was not only a prodigy, but also a little girl who thrived on pleasing audiences. Working with top teachers, she developed her art over the years. But by 16, Carlson began “chafing at [the] rigid, structured life” of a concert violinist–in-training and temporarily put music aside. At the urging of her mother, the high achiever set her sights on winning the Miss T.E.E.N. pageant, where she was first runner-up. College life at Stanford became yet another quest for perfection that led Carlson to admit it was “not attainable” after she earned a C in one class. At the end of her junior year and again at the urging of her mother, Carlson entered the 1989 Miss America pageant, which she would go on to win thanks to a brilliant violin performance. Dubbed the “smart Miss America,” Carlson struggled with pageant stereotypes as well as public perceptions of who she was. Being in the media spotlight every day during her reign, however, also helped her decide on a career in broadcast journalism. Yet success did not come easily. Sexual harassment dogged her, and many expressed skepticism about her abilities due to her pageant past. Even after she rose to national prominence, first as a CBS news broadcaster and then as a Fox talk show host, Carlson continued—and continues—to be labeled as “dumb or a bimbo.” Her history clearly demonstrates that she is neither. However, Carlson’s overly earnest tone, combined with her desire to show her Minnesota “niceness…in action,” as well as the existence of “abundant brain cells,” dampens the book’s impact.
For the author’s fans.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42745-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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