A humble and timely book that speaks to an era of sweeping change and a reminder that faith and love are two of the best...
A memoir from one of the most understated yet pivotal players in the history of American civil rights.
While most of his work occurred outside of the spotlight, Brown has left a deep imprint on the history of the African-American struggle for equality. Oft-identified as a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and “the only person allowed to visit Nelson Mandela” during his Cape Town imprisonment, the author fleshes out a lifetime studded with important experiences. Growing up in the Jim Crow North Carolina of the 1930s and ’40s, Brown endured a hardscrabble childhood under the love and tutelage of his compassionate grandmother “Mama,” Miss Nellie Brown. “Whether singing in our church’s gospel choir or canning vegetables,” writes the author, “she called out Jesus with the best of them and she set our moral compasses with lessons from the Bible.” After a stint in local law enforcement, the author landed a job in New York as a federal narcotics agent, launching a series of events that would lead to his meeting with King in 1958 and later executing a staged narcotics buy for the “Senate Rackets Committee’s top lawyer,” Robert F. Kennedy. With greater ambitions, Brown moved back to his home state and founded the public relations firm B&C International, which become the anchor of his significant role as a race-relations liaison between the black and white communities—business, political, or otherwise. Among his many achievements, the author chronicles his five years working as special assistant to President Richard Nixon, a job in which he developed the pivotal Office of Minority Business Enterprise. Throughout the volume, weaving together the stories of milestones personal and cultural, Brown continually falls back on the echoes of his grandmother, whose wisdom included the mantra, “you can find good anywhere, and you can do good everywhere.”
A humble and timely book that speaks to an era of sweeping change and a reminder that faith and love are two of the best weapons to counter hatred.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6278-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Convergent/Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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