This well-paced narrative absorbingly depicts a handful of lives in Indiana in a pivotal year.
A New Yorker faces challenges at a Midwestern college as the turmoil of the 1960s erupts in this debut memoir.
Vahl arrived at Indiana University in the autumn of 1963 without a family escort or any sense of what the future held. An adventurous young white student from a Jewish background, she settled on Indiana because she’d met a few Midwesterners and thought she liked them. In Bloomington, though, the author was stunned to discover not only pointed anti-Semitism, but sexism, creationism, and virulent racism as well. Nearly as soon as she arrived, her black roommate, Katherine Gates, explained that prior to this semester, the black students had been segregated from the others, forced to live in Quonset huts. As Vahl learned quickly thereafter, segments of the school’s student body were no less viciously racist than the administration: A black basketball player who dated her new white friend Shennandoah Waters was castrated and killed—and left in a ditch—the previous year. In the coming months, the author experienced not merely the usual stuff of college life (boys, bands, bad cafeteria food), but also Bibles “raised aloft like banners” at a lecture on evolution and, to compound the shock of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the reaction of her classmates. They threw a victory party, exclaiming: “It’s not just incredible—it’s the best day of our lives!” Vahl was horrified by many events in southern Indiana, but she enjoyed the sweet moments when she found them: dates with a sexy folk musician; the awakening of her love for making art; and delightful card games with her many black friends. The author has a good ear for dialogue and a nice sense of pacing. After a surprisingly slow start, this thoughtful chronicle of a single school year picks up momentum and rolls smoothly through the seasons. Though metaphors occasionally mix with abandon in these pages (“Here I was, cast up like so much human flotsam on the distant shores of this dim Gothic vault of a room, where unfamiliar accents echoed like sirens’ songs in my ears”), Vahl writes clearly and engagingly. Readers interested in Midwestern history, American race relations, and stories of culture shock will find the book both stimulating and convincing.
This well-paced narrative absorbingly depicts a handful of lives in Indiana in a pivotal year.Pub Date: July 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-365-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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