More American black men are in prison than in college. They are more likely than whites to die violently and young. Is the American black man an ``endangered species''? National Book Award winner Johnson (Middle Passage, 1990) and fellow novelist McCluskey (Mr. America's Last Season Blues, 1983) spent seven years collecting these original writings. Unfortunately, the perspectives provided here on this important question—with the exception of Yosef Komunyakaa's award-winning poetry and Don Belton's affecting essay, ``Voodoo for Charles''— are mostly tired and trite. The common thread throughout is the bleak reality of the lives of African-American males and their negative portrayal in the media. Often lacking identity and self- respect, many black men are said to perceive themselves as ``niggers.'' And those who do make it are accused here of too often being preoccupied with pursuing material success while ignoring social concerns. The writers ponder whether the underlying cause of this crisis is institutional racism, the educational system, economics, the lack of role models, or an insidious combination of all of the above. (Ironically, with few exceptions, African- American females don't emerge any more positively here than their male counterparts. Black mothers are often portrayed as abusive to their sons, dismissive of their needs, and incapable of instilling moral standards.) Gangs became the surrogate family to a generation of young men growing up without fathers and with mothers who are, at most, marginal to their lives. Their music is rap as it ``reflects the realities of the judicial system, prison, the police, and our failure as Black men to listen and reach out to young men and validate their worth.'' Despite the urgency of the subject matter, there isn't much here that hasn't been expressed more eloquently elsewhere. (10 b&w photos of art by Jacob Lawrence)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-253-33259-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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