A gritty and relentlessly grim survivor’s tale, certainly not for tender sensibilities.
An earnest memoir of life on the mean streets by the founder of a survivors group.
As the book opens, Myers-Powell, a former prostitute and drug addict, has just moved to Gary, Indiana, to live with her brother, who had moved from their native Chicago after he was robbed, and to try to pull her life back together. “I left my family twelve years before as a drop-dead beauty,” she writes, “and came back a messed-up crackhead.” Her world was one of shattered families and low expectations. Raised by a mean-spirited grandmother and pregnant early in her teenage years, Myers-Powell became a prostitute simply to survive. She was frequently raped and robbed by “gorilla pimps,” who “are brutal [and] can get creative with their violence.” Throughout the author’s early life, violence surrounded her (“Nobody was left in the house alive except a three-year-old baby. Some cold-blooded shit—they killed everybody. Shot them all in the head”). One by one, her friends on the streets fell victim to a Hobbesian world, and it was the same wherever she went: New Orleans, Los Angeles, rural truck stops in Indiana, back to Chicago, back and forth. Myers-Powell sometimes expresses defiant pride (“I was the baddest ho out there”) that she managed to free herself of her pimps and run her own show: “Being a prostitute and making money meant I was in control. I bought my own shit and smoked where I wanted to.” Still, after having spent time in California prisons, “stabbed thirteen times and shot five times” over the years, and finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she turned her life around and helped others like her, co-founding the Dreamcatcher Foundation, which fights trafficking and sexual exploitation. The author’s story, co-written by Reynolds, is consistently frank and often shocking, which may deter some readers.
A gritty and relentlessly grim survivor’s tale, certainly not for tender sensibilities.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-15169-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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