Sassy, inspiring, and uplifting.
An African-American female comedian recounts how she escaped poverty and a life of crime to become a respected performer.
One of five children born to a single mother, Williams spent the first years of her life growing up in her grandfather’s illegal liquor house in Decatur, Georgia. Petty crime was a way of life: when she was 8, her mother, who did “anything for a little extra cash…except get a regular job,” taught Williams to pickpocket the drunks who visited the liquor house. Her grandfather’s arrest for attempted murder forced her and her family to move out. Surviving on her mother's meager welfare checks, Williams and her siblings routinely scammed churches for free food. Her mother then took up with a man who kept the family fed but sexually abused both Williams and her older sister. At age 12, Williams became the girlfriend of a married 20-year-old man, Derrick. She gave birth to the first of two children she would have with him and dropped out of school a year later. Derrick supported them with odd jobs and later with money he made as a drug dealer. When he went to jail, Williams started selling drugs; soon she had a thriving business. She made enough money to support herself, her children, and relatives who joined her small family to escape homes that resembled “the seven circles of hell.” Williams continued dealing even after she met and married a man who “didn’t know shit about case workers, eviction notices or eating ketchup sandwiches for dinner.” At 23, she earned her GED and sought job training. When she discovered that her criminal record made it impossible to secure respectable employment, a caseworker casually remarked that Williams had a gift for making the tragic seem hilarious. Both savagely honest and often genuinely funny, this is the story of how a resilient woman survived a harrowing early life and found unexpected salvation through humor.
Sassy, inspiring, and uplifting.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-240730-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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