A beautifully written and innovatively structured memoir of a biracial Black man’s life journey.
A biracial Nigerian American lawyer, community leader, and activist tells his life story through the lens of his most important relationships with other Black men.
Jawando, a council member in Montgomery County, Maryland, grew up in a neighborhood where a number of Black boys he knew were deeply affected by the violence of structural racism. The author believes that the reason he “became a statistic on the positive side of America’s skewed racial balance sheet” is because he had access to a group of Black male mentors who nurtured him when he needed it most. These influential figures included Jawando’s stepfather, who helped him cope with his distant, depressed biological father; his high school gospel choir director, who drove Jawando to college and housed him when he served as an AmeriCorps volunteer; and his mother’s gay Black colleague Jay (“the first openly gay person who I ever met”), who took him to art museums and plays and emphasized the importance of being his whole self. Throughout, the author’s stories and analysis serve as an homage to the importance of providing Black boys with Black male role models. “The multisystem disease [affecting society] is called racism,” he writes. “How you cure it in Black boys is with the presence of present, diverse Black men who are willing to step up and be mentors. To be ‘fathers.’ The rewards flow to us all.” While Jawando begins with the idea that systemic racism can be cured with personal responsibility, in the remainder of the text, he deftly uses his personal story to provide a trenchant structural analysis of how American racism plays out in Black men’s everyday lives. His talent for creating striking imagery and memorable scenes draws readers in to his masterfully constructed world. Jawando treats his past self with compassion without ever skirting responsibility for his mistakes.
A beautifully written and innovatively structured memoir of a biracial Black man’s life journey.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60487-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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