A florid yet thorough and compelling history of missionary work and the 19th-century African-American experience both in...
A sinuously nuanced pursuit of a Southern Christian missionary couple’s conflicted journey from slaveholding Savannah, Ga., to West Africa.
In the thoroughgoing fashion of his Bancroft Prize–winning Dwelling Place (2005), religion historian Clarke devotes enormous care to delineating every aspect of the world known to his protagonists: Jane Bayard, from Savannah, and John Leighton Wilson, from Black River, S.C. The two well-to-do products of white plantation culture had made a marriage of convenience in 1834 in order to fulfill their dream of embracing missionary work in Liberia, as part of the expanding evangelical work sponsored by the American Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches. It was brave and dangerous work, especially since the pernicious miasmas (malaria) had felled most of the other white missionaries who arrived. However, the Wilsons survived, even thrived, setting up missions and schools for the colonists and native peoples. Newly freed—some of Jane’s own slaves from the Gullah community had been offered the choice to make a new life in Liberia—the African-American colonists were often riven by dissension, prompting the Wilsons to move father south to Gabon to start another mission among the Mpongwe. Curiously, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, patriotism resolved the couple to return to the South, believing “that the question of liberty was at the heart of the crisis.” Clarke underscores the irony of their use of the word “liberty” (as in the liberty of the North “to impose its will on the South”): This wise couple, who had fought the international slave law and worked fervently to educate and uplift the freed slaves, emerged from the war’s devastation mystified but committed to a moribund “Southern way of life.”
A florid yet thorough and compelling history of missionary work and the 19th-century African-American experience both in America and abroad.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-00272-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
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