An unusually sympathetic record, by the victim of a historic kidnapping. Wakefield was the 33-year-old wife of a prosperous Indian Agency doctor when the so-called Dakota War broke out in Minnesota in 1862 (the war cost the lives of some 500 whites and an unknown number of Indians). A small band of Sioux captured her and her children and held them hostage for a month and a half, during which time Wakefield, an observant chronicler, noted the ways of her captors and explained their good reasons for having risen in revolt. Weighing more than 200 pounds and captured with a huge larder of food in her reservation home, Wakefield observes, ``People blame me for having sympathy for these creatures, but I take this view of the case: Suppose the same number of whites were living in sight of food, purchased with their own money, and their children dying of starvation, how long do you think they would remain quiet?'' In constant fear of enduring what the 19th century deemed ``the fate worse than death''—namely, rape—Wakefield found herself protected by the band's leader, Chaska, and no harm came to her. In the brief war's aftermath, 392 Dakotas were sentenced to hang for their role in the outbreak. President Lincoln pardoned all but 39; one of the unlucky men to hang was Chaska, Wakefield's protector, about which turn of events she is duly indignant. The editor, historian June Namias (Univ. of Alaska, Anchorage), tries a little too hard to justify this reprinting of Wakefield's intrinsically interesting document, delving into psychobiography to establish it as different from the many captivity narratives now in print, as indeed it is. But Namias does a fine job of annotating Wakefield's memoir, and her introduction provides needed context. Students of Native American and Western women's history will find this a valuable contribution. (15 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8061-2975-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
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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