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COMING FULL CIRCLE

FROM JIM CROW TO JOURNALISM

Inspiring reading for aspiring journalists and students of civil rights.

A pioneering newspaper editor illuminates the importance of racial diversity in newsrooms and the difficulties of achieving that diversity, especially for black women.

In a memoir that runs from her birth in 1949 to 2019, Lloyd (co-editor: The Edge of Change: Women in the Twenty-First-Century Press, 2009) offers hundreds of anecdotes and scenarios about how she managed to ascend to the top spots at major newspapers in an industry dominated by white males. The author had one advantage that many black women of her generation lacked due to pervasive racial segregation and gender inequities: She was born into a well-educated, economically comfortable family. Her upbringing—mostly in Savannah, Georgia—qualifies as unconventional (no spoilers here), but she never lacked for support from her close-knit relatives. After excelling in a severely segregated public school system, Lloyd entered Spelman College in Atlanta, an elite liberal arts institution for black women. There, she expanded her horizons by mingling with classmates who, unlike her, had attended schools with nonblack students and teachers. As the author notes, she had never crossed paths with whites in her daily life. After graduating from Spelman, Lloyd knew she wanted to become a journalist, but such a career seemed highly unlikely for a black woman. Though newspapers often publicly advocated for integration throughout society, their editors and publishers rarely practiced what they preached. Impressively, Lloyd managed to break through. With a combination of her unquestionable talent and fortuitous timing, she broke a series of glass ceilings until she became executive editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. Along the way, she had also achieved influential editing positions at the Washington Post, Miami Herald, and USA Today, the flagship of the Gannett chain, a company that was ahead of its competitors in its practice of promoting women. Though Lloyd is not always self-effacing about her accomplishments, it’s not bragging if you have done it—and she has done a lot.

Inspiring reading for aspiring journalists and students of civil rights.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-58838-407-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: NewSouth

Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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BORN SURVIVORS

THREE YOUNG MOTHERS AND THEIR EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF COURAGE, DEFIANCE, AND HOPE

An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...

The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.

Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”

An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.

Pub Date: May 5, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015

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