A pleasant success story.
In this debut memoir, a black Air Force veteran recounts his unlikely rise from rural poverty to the upper middle class.
Born in the Arkansas Delta in 1943, Strother was the seventh child of poor parents. His mother worked various manual jobs, including picking cotton for local farmers; his father was the secretary and treasurer of his church. When the author was born, most of his neighbors over 40 couldn’t read or write and young people frequently moved to the North to find better employment opportunities. Strother was no different: “Even though I loved the people in my community, I disliked intensely almost everything about where I grew up. I always felt out-of-place.” As soon as he graduated from high school, he rushed to join the Air Force like his older brother Curtis. Experiencing racism from whites in the South while he was wearing his Air Force uniform—proof that he was willing to fight and die for the United States—brought home the discrimination that Strother would face throughout his life. But the Air Force provided him the opportunity to live abroad in West Germany, where, removed from the American dynamics of black and white, he was able to experience something closer to racial equality. After marrying a German woman and moving with her to Detroit, Strother did not let the expectations of others hold him back from pursuing the American dream. In his book, which features some family photographs, the author recounts attending night school to become a computer programmer, getting a job with a major corporation, working his way up to salesman and then district manager, and investing in real estate. Strother skillfully summons his memories using a simple, direct prose: “When Papa went to the bank to withdraw his money, it was closed and out of business. After that, he started to keep his money in Prince Albert tobacco containers, which he would bury around his house.” There’s a soothing rhythm to the narration, though it tends to ramble unpredictably. While Strother led an accomplished life, the achievements were not flashy ones, and he does not imbue them with much excitement. The author seems to intend for this to be an inspirational memoir, but readers will likely end up not feeling much emotion beyond a satisfaction that Strother’s life worked out nicely.
A pleasant success story.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4791-3902-6
Page Count: 259
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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