Poston, a well-known black journalist who died in 1974, has been well served by editor Hauke, who came upon these ten sketches of black children growing up in a southern town at the turn of the century, then edited and annotated them for publication and wrote a useful introduction. Though the quality of the sketches varies, they constitute a good-natured portrait of life in the segregated South. Told by ``Ted,'' a student at the Booker T. Washington Colored Grammar School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the tales range from pastoral pieces (occasionally with some bite) about swimming and fishing to portraits of small-town types. In ``Mr. Jack Johnson and Me,'' for instance, B'Rob serves as mentor to the young narrator, setting him right about the history of slavery, correcting ideas received from the town's white power structure. Likewise, in ``Birth of a Notion,'' the blacks successfully protest the arrival in town of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. In ``Cousin Blind Mary,'' a fortuneteller who seems to know everything after a ``night to consult the spirits'' gets her information from a network of black women who work for the whites. Meanwhile, Rat Joiner is a recurring character—a milder, gentler version of Bigger Thomas who, despite obstacles, devises a plan (``Rat Joiner Whips the Kaiser'') to win the WW I Liberty Bond Contest. In ``The Revolt of the Evil Fairies,'' perhaps the most affecting of the personal sketches, Ted spoils a presentation of ``Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty'' when he realizes he ``couldn't have been Prince Charming'' however obedient he pretended to be. Anecdotes and reminiscences are strung together to create an evocative miscellany—with Hauke's extensive notes linking together real-life counterparts with Poston's semi-fictional creations.
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8203-1302-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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