Tough and challenging ideas couched in disarming prose.
Legal scholar and Nation columnist Williams offers a stimulating mix of reminiscences and finely honed arguments as she tries to answer the question a friend once posed: Who is the one person she could never be?
Like most of her writings (Seeing a Color-Blind Future, 1998, etc.), this is fundamentally a work of serious intent, even though the illustrative anecdotes are often charming as well as apt. Employing the beguiling image of an open house whose rooms she associates with friends, family, and memories, Williams grapples in “The Boudoir,” “The Kitchen,” “The Outhouse,” and other essays with big questions—race, identity, burgeoning technology—while setting them firmly in the context of her own life. The story of how Great-aunt Mary passed for white when she married a Boston lawyer, for example, seems to Williams an example of how racial and cultural mixing, “nonconformist, embarrassing, and once illegal,” are nonetheless inherent aspects of American society. Her experience learning to play the piano in her 50s occasions recollections of the hostile reaction she received when asked to give the Reith Lectures on the BBC. Described as a militant black feminist who hates whites, she thinks such characterizations of black women are still very common on campus and in the law. Williams ponders the importance of O, the Oprah Magazine (maybe “romantic humanitarianism isn’t such a bad thing”); delineates her reactions to her son’s bout with Kawasaki disease (“I feel it as kind of permanent inner snowstorm”); and elucidates the significance of the names African-Americans gave their children after slavery was abolished, suggesting that some were intended to disguise their origins so that former owners could not find them. In school and in the wider world, she finds, African-Americans constantly battle stereotypes that lead whites to view them as impostors—or the help.
Tough and challenging ideas couched in disarming prose.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-11407-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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