Well written and richly detailed, this book is a strong contribution to the literature of Black militancy.
The history of a dynasty of Black resistance.
“The legacy of the Shakur family exists all around us—in culture, activism, and our professional lives,” writes journalist Holley. Best known is Tupac, murdered in 1996 at the age of 25, who brought a questioning complexity to his lyrics that has remained influential. His mother, Afeni, was an activist in the Black Panther Party, which was a tiny organization in New York until she joined in 1968 and became an engaged speaker and recruiter. Activist Bill Hampton called it “a service organization and a black liberation army,” but J. Edgar Hoover discounted the service aspect and launched an extensive campaign against the Panthers involving informants and surveillance. Afeni was swept up in a charge of conspiracy and jailed until, pregnant with Tupac, she was acquitted in May 1971. She remained a committed activist, while others in the family and organization drifted when the Panthers began to break apart. Assata Shakur became an activist in the Black Liberation Army—though, Holley writes, she “was more of an enigma than a leader.” Convicted of murder, she escaped from prison in 1979 and has lived ever since in Cuba. Mutulu Shakur, “a soldier in the New Afrikan Security Forces” who became a leader and holistic healer, married Afeni after Tupac was born. Later, he was implicated in a series of admittedly undisciplined armed robberies; he was released from prison in December 2022 after four decades, but even as he languished there, his acupuncture-based techniques for narcotics detoxification were widely employed. “What remains today of the Black liberation movement is not immediately evident,” writes Holley, but much of it resides in social justice work, youth education, and food programs—and much of that owes to the Shakurs.
Well written and richly detailed, this book is a strong contribution to the literature of Black militancy.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780358588764
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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