An engaging biography of three remarkable women who taught art to reflect life.
Griffin (English/Columbia Univ.; If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, 2001) explores the brief period of opportunity in the 1940s when the remarkable talents of Pearl Primus, Ann Petry and Mary Lou Williams changed art and society.
Unlike the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, when people with talent flocked to Harlem, the war years fostered homegrown talent and enabled artists the freedom to mix their art with politics. The music, dance and writing of these three women, mixed with their politics, helped to usher in the modern civil rights movement. Four factors laid the foundation for this grand awakening: World War II, the second great migration from the South, the Popular Front in politics and culture, and the Double V Campaign. With Double V (Victory at Home and Abroad), black Americans insisted on their social and civil rights while fighting for their country overseas. The author meticulously shows how each woman used and expanded her art to increase awareness of a society that had been ignored and abused too long. Their extraordinary talents ensured that she would find abundant information about each, and Griffin effortlessly relates each story. All three women were associated with communist activities, but only Primus was an actual party member. In a period when class differences were finally being threatened, it was the communists who attracted the downtrodden and taught them how to affect politics with the tools at their disposal. Petry, Primus and Williams exposed the limits of the democracy of their time while unceasingly clinging to the firm belief that these wrongs could be righted.
An engaging biography of three remarkable women who taught art to reflect life.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-01875-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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