Polemics overlaid on personal history—reader affinity required.
An African-American turns to genealogy to plumb the lives and times of her white Southern forebears during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In presenting the results of exhaustive personal research into a racially mixed branch of her family tree, playwright and novelist Davis (Maker of Saints, 1996, etc.) emphasizes that her findings are hardly unique. Any African-American with kin “from the South or West way back when,” she asserts, “is likely to have family ties—black and white—to the founders of the country [as well as] the American system of bondage.” In telling the story of her search for ancestors that began with old letters, the writings of her grandmother and a strange photograph of a black child of the 19th century completely decked out in authentic tartan plaid, Davis also documents the condition of blacks making the transition from bondage to Emancipation as “freedmen and freedwomen.” (Her use of the term and its application to herself intimate that the transition is ongoing.) The story centers on the encounter in the 1870s between her African-American great-grandmother, Chloe Curry, and Will Campbell, scion of an influential white cotton-planting clan with proud Scottish roots (refugees, in fact, from the horrors of guerilla-style terrorism in Civil War Missouri). The evolution of that relationship from household employment to lifelong companionship (they never married) takes place against the cataclysmic background of failed Reconstruction in Mississippi’s Yazoo County. Burnings, shootings, lynchings and rapes were exacted against blacks who voted against the “redeeming” white supremacist ticket. The author reacts variously with shock, sarcasm and occasional vituperation as injustices surface in her research, forcing her to embrace her African heritage with vigor.
Polemics overlaid on personal history—reader affinity required.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-465-01555-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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