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OLD AGE IS ANOTHER COUNTRY

A TRAVELER'S GUIDE

In a series of generally sage essays, historian Smith (Democracy on Trial, p. 767, etc.) forsakes public chronicles for the private kind as he describes the passage toward a destination from whose bourne no traveler is likely to return. The professor is now in his eighth decade and sufficiently long in the tooth to provide a geriatric study direct from the horse's mouth, as it were. He is sprightly as well as wrinkled, clever as well as creaky, querulous, and crotchety. Age, he says, ``is a pain in the ass.'' He is a sagacious old guy, but do not call him a ``senior citizen''who wants that nice-nellyism? Do not offer him a demeaning ``senior discount,'' either. Don't take him for a golf outing or on a cruise. (Tennis and trout fishing would be just fine, though.) Worst of all for those who have something to contribute and a full complement of their marbles is talk about retirement. It is anathema to Smith, who calls for a constitutional amendment to prevent enforced retirement. That's ageism, which according to Smith is really ``prejudice against the future of the self.'' Occasionally veering toward Hallmarkism, as in a piece on the admitted charms of grandmothers, the wise old prof never wanders far from truth. His guide ranges from geezer jokes and old health to thoughts on elder sex (not a bad idea) and death (expect it). The text surely derives more from the primeval need to edify future generations than from the need to offer advice to fellow oldsters. A bit of clear thinking on some age-old questions about old age.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-89594-802-8

Page Count: 232

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995

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THE ORIGIN OF OTHERS

As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.

Essays focused on an overarching question: “What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?”

Melding memoir, history, and trenchant literary analysis, Nobel Prize laureate Morrison (Emeritus, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; God Help the Child, 2015, etc.) offers perceptive reflections on the configuration of Otherness. Revised from her Norton Lectures at Harvard, the volume consists of six essays that consider how race is conceived, internalized, and culturally transmitted, drawing in part on writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Conrad, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the African writer Camara Laye, whose novel The Radiance of the King Morrison greatly admires. Laye told the story of a white man, stranded and destitute in Africa, struggling to maintain his assumptions of white privilege. For Morrison, the novel illuminates the pressures that “make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of humanity.” She also offers insightful glosses into her own aims as a novelist. “Narrative fiction,” she writes, “provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.” In Beloved, for example, she reimagined the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who had killed her children rather than see them enslaved, as she had been. In A Mercy, she examined “the journey from sympathetic race relations to violent ones fostered by religion.” In Paradise, she delved into the issue of hierarchies of blackness by looking at “the contradictory results of devising a purely raced community”; she purposely did not identify her characters’ race in order to “simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was.” In God Help the Child, Morrison considered “the triumphalism and deception that colorism fosters.” Her current novel in progress, she discloses, explores “the education of a racist—how does one move from a non-racial womb to the womb of racism”?

As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-674-97645-0

Page Count: 116

Publisher: Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017

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NOTES OF A NATIVE SON

The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.

He bares the brutal boners of "everybody's protest novel" from Stowe to Wright; points out that black is "devil-color" according to Christian theology and to "make white" is thus to save; reveals the positive base of Carmen Jones, movie version, as Negroes are white, that is, moral. Beyond such artistic attitudinal displays lie experimental realities: the Harlem Ghetto with its Negro press, the positive element of which tries to emulate the white press and provides an incongruous mixture of slick style and stark subject; the Ghetto with its churches and its hatred of the American reality behind the Jewish face (from which, as sufferers, so much was expected). There is a trip to Atlanta for the Wallace campaign and indignities endured; there is a beautiful essay, from which the book takes its title- of father and son and the corroding power of hate as it could grow from injustice. In Europe, there is the encounter of African and American Negro; a sojourn in jail over a stolen sheet; and last, the poignant essay of the first Negro to come to a remote Swiss village, to be greeted as a living wonder. This is not true in America, where he has a place, though equivocal, in our united life.

The expression of so many insights enriches rather than clarifies, and behind every page stalks a man, an everyman, seeking his identity...and ours. Exceptional writing.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1955

ISBN: 0807064319

Page Count: -

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955

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