A frank and detailed memoir of service in the face of discrimination.
An officer recounts the obstacles he faced as a minority in the Navy in this debut memoir.
A black high school dropout who joined the Navy in 1975, Green retired two decades later as a decorated surface-warfare officer. There weren’t many black naval officers at the time, and Green is the first to tell readers that his was not a smooth ascendancy. The author uses his own story as a window into the institutional discrimination that he asserts has always characterized the Navy. While conditions have improved a bit since Green’s day, sailors who are female, LGBT, or from minority backgrounds continue to fight uphill battles to earn places in ships’ wardrooms, according to the author. Weaving between history and personal experience, Green’s narrative begins with Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt’s efforts to reduce racism and sexism in the Navy and ends with Green going head-to-head with a discriminatory commanding officer in the 1990s. Along the way, he butted heads with all manner of obstacles and characters, discovered his aptitude for engineering, excelled in a system that viewed him with hostility, contended with ship explosions and helicopter crashes, and helped bend the arc of history a little closer to justice. “Unlike most sea stories,” writes Green, “this one is largely verifiable, has a mostly happy ending, and, as most old sailors would say (but not quite this way), every word of it is true.” Green has a natural raconteur’s ability, telling his story with candor and humor: “I have been in several David versus Goliath battles, created a few tipping points, and have often had the dog’s perspective, having been occasionally treated like one. Sometimes I wonder if” Malcolm Gladwell “might have been secretly following me around.” Much of the book’s drama takes place in the world of naval bureaucracy and protocols, so it does not always make for the easiest or most exciting reading. That said, Green’s account skillfully confronts the racism he faced head-on and makes no apologies for the status quo. His eloquent warnings for what he sees as America’s current crisis in leadership underscore the fact that, for the Navy, plenty of troubled water still lies ahead.
A frank and detailed memoir of service in the face of discrimination.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-975747-54-1
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
