Preachiness aside: a lively, intelligent example of African-American Christian uplift.
In a memoir larded with inspirational messages, its title borrowed from her syndicated column, Young describes her childhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
The author’s black neighborhood, Stoner Hill, seems a throwback to an earlier time: a semi-rural world in which clichéd idylls of strawberry-picking, church attendance, and loving family gatherings contrast with the more dramatic if no less familiar incidents of violence and failed ambition that poverty engenders. Whites remain a vague enemy, seldom actually encountered. Young Londa grows up influenced by three powerful women. Londa’s mother survives being shot by her ex-husband when Londa is six to do whatever it takes to provide a stable and upwardly mobile life for her children and herself. Despite unrelenting poverty, Londa’s grandmother maintains a supportive and loving home in which she and her husband raise a passel of children. Londa’s great-grandmother, “Big Momma,” is the spiritual heart of this devoutly Baptist family, and in Big Momma’s tradition, Young cannot resist teaching lessons. Even her earliest memory, of playing musical chairs her friends in their Head Start class, makes the game an obvious metaphor for a world in which there will not be enough opportunities to go around. Smart and ambitious, Londa gets the opportunities. When the Stoner Hill kids integrate a white middle school, her mother fights to get her onto the college track, and Londa ends up a student-council member. While the always morally uplifting endings to her stories can become tiresome, the author’s sense of humor about herself is winning. Here’s a girl who can admit to following the rules in The Preppy Handbook for months without realizing that they were written in irony, but who can also admit that those Polo shirts purchased under its sway felt awfully good next to her skin.
Preachiness aside: a lively, intelligent example of African-American Christian uplift.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50493-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
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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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