One of the most candid and lucent books on race in this or any other year.
Powerful, wrenching story of a racial killing during the author’s North Carolina childhood.
Tyson (African-American Studies/University of Wisconsin–Madison) was only ten in 1970, when a young black husband and father was savagely beaten and then shot to death in Oxford, North Carolina, by some white men who claimed he had insulted one of their women. The killers were subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury. The author artfully weaves together a number of stories in this account. We hear about his own family, going back several generations but with major attention devoted to Tyson’s father, a liberal white preacher in Oxford who had an admirable record of working to improve race relations, though his son fondly chides him for the subconsciously racist notion that the goal of the civil-rights movement was to make black people more like whites. Tyson also sketches the histories of the victim, the killers, and the leaders of Oxford’s white and black communities. He scathingly depicts the dilatory police and the risible, ridiculous trial. He writes about the civil-rights movement’s high and low points (the 1970 shootings at Jackson State included among the latter). And he chronicles his tumultuous coming of age. Tyson ran away from home at 17, but a lovely passage describes his father finding him walking along a rural road, holding him tight, and praying for him. After several years of indulgence in drugs and general dissipation, the author decided to enroll in college: “And the first thing I did as a twenty-four-year-old freshman was to drive to Oxford, North Carolina, to ask Robert Teel why he’d killed Henry Marrow.” Tyson returned again as a graduate student and then as a historian to research the story that inhabits the heart of this remarkable work: a reminder that the struggle for racial equality prompted vileness and violence on all sides.
One of the most candid and lucent books on race in this or any other year.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61058-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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