A bit like an overlong home movie.
Adoring biography of a pioneering African-American businessman from his niece and grandniece.
Birmingham, Alabama, was a tough city to grow up in if you were a young black man in the early 1900s, but according to former TV anchorwoman Jenkins and her daughter Hines, A.G. Gaston managed to thrive during the majority of his 103 years there. He made it through tenth grade, worked at a variety of difficult jobs, including a stint in the iron mines, then served in WWI. Back home he found “few opportunities and ample disdain,” until opening his lunchbox one day in the mine prompted a business epiphany. His mother’s fried chicken was so good that fellow workers clamored to share it, so Gaston started a little lunch business. The authors go on to extol their forebear’s business acumen, noting that while some might label him an opportunist, he always remained true to his dictum: “find a need and fill it.” (Throughout, Jenkins and Hines pour out Gaston’s rules for success and homespun wisdom like ketchup on fries.) African-American community needs in Birmingham were certainly many, and few were being filled until Gaston came along. An indefatigable saver of his modest income, he started a small lending practice (charging 25 percent interest), then a funeral-insurance agency. During the Depression he bought script at 50 percent of its face value and started a motel and restaurant, amassing a sizable fortune. Civil-rights activists knew they could turn to Gaston when they needed money or a liaison with the white community. He was more like Booker T. Washington than Martin Luther King, more National Negro Business League than NAACP, but in tumultuous civil-rights-era Birmingham that was enough to get his house firebombed. His descendants’ loving portrait reveals the pivotal, if milder, role black business leaders played in the struggle for racial justice, but familial minutia blurs Gaston rather than adding to his focus.
A bit like an overlong home movie.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45347-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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.
