A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.
Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s “Back to Africa” movement.
BBC radio producer Grant, himself the son of Caribbean immigrants, delivers a spellbinding portrait of Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a printer who mobilized millions through his creation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey’s program of racial pride and economic uplift proposed an exodus of black people from the United States, the Caribbean and Central America to a colony in Liberia. Operating mainly from Harlem, he saw his dream of a thriving African homeland for blacks collapse in 1923 after he was convicted of mail fraud, an offense for which he later served a two-year prison sentence. Disgraced, dispirited and largely forgotten by the adoring throngs who once invested in his Black Star shipping line and other self-help business enterprises, the colorful self-styled “President-King” of Africa endured the agony of reading premature (and often vicious) obituaries published long before his death in London at age 52. The author notes that he was drawn to the myth and mystery of Garvey after accompanying his mother on a trip to her native Jamaica. Grant’s learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page, but that doesn’t prevent him from delivering a clear-eyed portrait of a man whose genuine commitment to bettering the lives of blacks was compromised by an outsized ego, a penchant for pageantry and unbridled disdain for mainstream crusaders such as NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Instead, Grant reveals, Garvey publicly and proudly claimed an ally in the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard, who naturally cheered his “Back to Africa” scheme.
A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-19-536794-2
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
