A well-structured memoir told in brief, punchy vignettes alternating between past and present.
A spirited pursuit of her mother’s roots takes one African-American woman from Jamaica to Harlem to China.
A former NBC executive who is now CEO of a family investment group based in Chicago, Madison (who lives in Los Angeles) proves a formidable, dogged detective in tracing the complicated ramifications of her Chinese grandfather’s work in Jamaica and return to China in the early 1930s. A teenager when he arrived in Jamaica in 1905, Samuel Lowe came from the Hakka minority ethnic group noted for its entrepreneurial drive; soon, he set up one thriving “Chiney shop” after another. He developed romantic attachments with the local ladies; in liaisons not unusual in Jamaica at the time, he fathered several children by different women. The first of these “outside children” was the author’s mother, Nell Vera Lowe, whose distinctive Chinese look would cast her as a kind of pariah in her community. In time, Lowe married a family-designated Chinese bride sent from home, who bore him several more children. Thus, when Lowe returned with his wife to China during the business-stifling Depression, he left Nell behind, among other children, who scarcely knew him or each other. Badly treated by her mother, who resented her Chinese looks, Nell eventually immigrated to New York and became a citizen, raising her children largely on her own when her Jamaican husband proved troublesome and unfaithful. Madison traces this tale of loss through her mother’s story: Without education, Nell was doomed to a hard life of work as a seamstress, and she endured welfare and marginalization with a ferocious protectiveness toward her children. As the author pursues Lowe’s family in China, arranging visits and sifting through minute ancestral details, she proves a valiant avenger of her mother’s difficult past.
A well-structured memoir told in brief, punchy vignettes alternating between past and present.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0062331632
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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