An eloquently told story that should make an impact.
A distinguished African American attorney’s account of how growing up in the Jim Crow South impacted her later struggle to overturn desegregation laws.
Segregation was a hard fact of life for African Americans when North Carolina native Roundtree (1914-2018) was a child. Undaunted, her mother pushed her and her sisters to become “women of destiny” by pursuing their educations. The author excelled in school and was accepted to Spelman College in Atlanta. After a short stint teaching, she traveled to Washington, D.C., where she went to work for Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, who recommended her for the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Roundtree took her first stand against racism while in the military when she successfully spoke out against Army plans to segregate the WAAC. At the end of the war, she was offered a position with the Fair Employment Practices Committee in California. She had initially wanted to go to medical school, but she soon came to realize that a law degree would best serve her desire to “chang[e] the world in which I’d come of age.” Roundtree attended Howard University School of Law and then began the legal work that would lead to the eventual “shattering of Jim Crow.” In 1955, she won a major victory in the Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company case, which helped bring about the end of the separate-but-equal practices that had been at the heart of segregation laws. Her law practice thrived, but a period of ill health and “nagging restlessness” caused her to turn to her religion for solace. Later, she enrolled in the Howard University Divinity School and became one of the first ordained female ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a leading light in “yet another war, a war for [abused] children.” Thoughtful and highly inspiring, this book, co-authored by McCabe, is not only a moving memoir; it is also an important contribution to the history of civil rights in America. Tayari Jones provides the foreword.
An eloquently told story that should make an impact.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-955-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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