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REMEMBERING EMMETT TILL

Name: REMEMBERING EMMETT TILL
Author: Dave Tell
ISBN: 978-0-226-55953-7

by Dave Tell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2019

A book with broad application to the study of the civil rights movement but particularly useful for students and...

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History is written by the victors—but also by committees and grant agencies, the subject of this excursus into the “ecology of memory.”

Emmett Till, 14 years old, was murdered in August 1955, his body weighted down and sunk in the Tallahatchie River of Mississippi. His crime: allegedly whistling at a white woman. The killing has been presented as ground zero of the civil rights movement ever since, though, as Tell (Communications/Univ. of Kansas) points out, the real work in Mississippi was done through “door-to-door canvassing and the development of local leadership.” Till’s death, with no punishment of the killers, remains a matter contested in memory: How should he be commemorated? Should the store where his transgression occurred be preserved? Tell, the principal investigator of the Emmett Till Memory Project, takes readers through thickets of politics and commemoration, of fact and fiction, and of local communities trying to leverage civil rights histories to which they may not have strong connections. This is an academic book, and the author commits some labored prose to the page, as when he strains to link the Tallahatchie to the Greek river Lethe in “an intimate series of connection among rivers, oblivion, and forgetfulness.” Still, this is also a book likely to displease local chambers of commerce, memorial designers, and others who would weave together stories that were once considered separate and even today are not fully answered. As he writes, for instance, "while the inclusion of Bryant’s Grocery in Till’s story is no longer controversial, questions about what precisely happened in the store remain as all-consuming as they were in 1955.” Controversially, Tell suggests that the paternalism that led to Till’s death is also fully in command of his commemoration nearly 65 years later.

A book with broad application to the study of the civil rights movement but particularly useful for students and practitioners of local history and civic tourism.

Pub Date: May 6, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-226-55953-7

Page Count: 312

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.