An earnest, adulatory discussion of the classic exposÇ of racism and the memorable life of its author, John Howard Griffin. Bonazzi, who published some of Griffin's writings at his Latitudes Press and is possibly the world's only Griffin scholar, deserves credit for explaining, albeit briefly, the fascinating events that shaped Griffin's character as a crusader against racism. Born in Dallas in 1920, Griffin extricated himself from his provincial surroundings by writing to a boys' school in Tours, France, and receiving a full scholarship at age 15. He stayed in France for the next six years, first at school and then, after the Nazi occupation, working with the Resistance to help save Jews. A stint in the air force brought him into contact with Solomon Islanders, dashing what few southern preconceptions about white superiority he still harbored; and a bombardment blinded him for ten years. Back home, he converted to Catholicism and wrote a bestselling novel, The Devil Rides Outside. In 1959, he hit on the idea of darkening his skin and touring the Deep South disguised as a black man for a magazine series that became Black Like Me, published in 1961 to wide acclaim. The bulk of Bonazzi's tome is a summary of that work, with copious quotes from Griffin's own words, which remind one of just how skillful a prose stylist he was. Bonazzi's glosses tend merely to rephrase clumsily what Griffin has just been quoted saying with perfect clarity. In quoting from other of Griffin's works and playing up his intellectually rigorous Catholicism (he was friends with Thomas Merton and Jacques Maritain), Bonazzi places Black Like Me within a lifelong quest to understand and share with others his religious ideals of humanitarianism and mercy. Still, readers will probably be sorely tempted to toss this aside and go straight to Black Like Me to get the insights without the interruptions. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57075-118-8
Page Count: 206
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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