A life and movement that deserve to be chronicled, but the book would have been improved by more judicious editing.
A story from inside the Black Panther party and its fight for black equality in the civil rights era.
An often uncomfortable but realistic picture of racial tension in the 1960s and ’70s, first time author Pharr’s memoir focuses on his experiences with the Black Panthers. The author was an active member of the party in Los Angeles, moving up the ranks until he found himself opposed to Huey P. Newton’s style of leadership and quietly disengaged himself. While Pharr is most intent on giving an inside view of the militaristic side of the Black Panthers, including lots of detail about a shootout with police at headquarters, he also describes some of the community activism the Panthers engaged in. Free breakfast for children and conflict resolution without police involvement are highlights of that work for the community. More detail about these and other programs would have presented a rounder picture of Black Panther philosophy and provided the book with a wider audience. Due to the spotlight on self-defense, police brutality is central to the story. While ugly, its inclusion will help readers understand the Panthers’ focus on defense and their own violent contributions to the ongoing conflict. Unfortunately, the dialogue is uneven throughout; while many conversations are laid back and full of slang, others are overly formal and even stilted. Liberal use of ’70s slang is likely to make this an inaccessible read for younger generations. While probably realistic to the time it covers, this is a serious problem for a book attempting to educate those who didn’t live through that period. “I believe the Black Panthers and other militant organizations,” writes the author, “did more to ensure our human and civil rights than all the marching and praying of the last 100 years.” That’s debatable, to be sure, but Pharr’s central story is gripping.
A life and movement that deserve to be chronicled, but the book would have been improved by more judicious editing.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-916-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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