by Nash K. Burger with Amelia Pearl McHaney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 1995
Gentle memoirs of Mississippi youth and literary life from a longtime New York Timesman, aided by editor and teacher McHaney. Burger grew up in Jackson, Miss. Somewhat younger than William Faulkner, whom he encountered as a child, Burger is an exact contemporary of his lifelong friend Eudora Welty and also of Richard Wright, who grew up across town from him though they never met. While Welty remains near the center, however, this succinct, modest autobiography does not dwell on literary celebrity, but celebrates instead the everyday conjunctures that gave life to the communities that Burger limns. Opening chapters tell of the ``North-South romance and marriage'' that brought together his mother, from New England, and his Virginian father. Quoting from family letters, he narrates their removal to Jackson, where his father worked in sales for a shoe company. While frankly colored by nostalgia, Burger's childhood memories of school, sports, and scouting feature arresting detail. Reminiscing about his favorite books, Burger brings alive the excitement of reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, while offering an informative tour through the distinctive children's literature of the South. Books have been Burger's ruling passion. Memories of Sewanee College and of the University of Virginia show his formation in the prewar flowering of southern intellectual life. After WW II Burger was brought on board the Sunday New York Times Book Review by Welty, then on its staff. While at the Times, Burger helped bring the Civil War and religious topics to prominence in the book world. Today's practitioners will envy Burger the leisured pace afforded him for his book reviewing and editing. One remains curious as to how Burger, a southerner in New York during the civil rights years, resolved the contradictions between his self-confessed Confederate ``ideology'' and his generous attitude toward African-Americans. Agreeable reflections, though not of universal interest.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-87805-793-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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