Recalling her girlhood frustration at finding no books that accurately reflected the female experience, Marilyn French...
In celebration of its 30th anniversary, City University’s Feminist Press offers an anthology on growing up female, with pieces drawn from contemporary authors as well as the neglected masters the Press helped restore to prominence. Part One, “Family,” includes such classics as an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s gritty, groundbreaking 1942 memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road; “Raymond’s Run” (1979), by recently deceased Toni Cade Bambara, which portrays an African-American girl’s love for her brother, is among the modern work here. The “Teachers and Friends” section ranges from “The Fire,” Helen Rose Hull’s 1917 tale of a teenager’s subtly erotic relationship with her art teacher, to an excerpt from A Cross and a Star, in which Marjorie Agosín chronicles her Jewish mother’s experiences growing up in a small Chilean town filled with Nazis. Part Three, “Work and the World,” contains some of the publisher’s most treasured rediscoveries, from Agnes Smedley (Daughters of Earth) to Kate Chopin (“Wiser Than God”).
Recalling her girlhood frustration at finding no books that accurately reflected the female experience, Marilyn French exclaims in her introduction, “If only The Feminist Press had existed then!” Today’s mothers and daughters will cherish this wide-ranging collection as a pleasing reminder that it’s here now.Pub Date: May 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-55861-233-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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