Any woman who divorces her first husband simply by declaring him dead is at the very least intriguing: Horne takes on a...
The journey of an itinerant activist, narrated by historian Horne (Fire This Time, not reviewed).
Shirley Graham Du Bois had a life in the arts and something of a political reputation before she married W.E.B. Du Bois, the noted scholar and civil rights leader, in his autumnal years. Horne would have us believe that she didn’t simply marry him as a matter of convenience (he was 81 and she was 55 at the time), but he acknowledges that Shirley’s marriage to Du Bois gave her life a stability and grounding that she never really had before. Extremely fair-skinned, Shirley (born in Indianapolis to Native Americans who claimed French, Scots, Irish, and English blood) always insisted that she was Negro. Her father was a much-traveled African Methodist Episcopal minister who took care to develop his daughter’s interest in music and writing. Shirley’s early years were a dilettante’s muddle of assorted colleges attended, countries visited, and opportunities missed. In the middle of the Depression she staged an opera (Tom Tom) with a cast of 500. No one came. She seemed to have a far greater talent for latching on to people of influence—from NAACP founder Mary White Ovington to Mao Tse Tung—and moving on in her opportunistic way. Slowly, she drifted into political involvement and married Du Bois during the heart of the “Red Scare”—a fact she seemed to enjoy flaunting whenever she took trips to the Soviet Union and China. In the 1960s she joined the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah, then the president of Ghana. A Communist, she became a citizen of Tanzania and died in China in 1977. Chou En Lai attended her funeral.
Any woman who divorces her first husband simply by declaring him dead is at the very least intriguing: Horne takes on a difficult subject and does a serviceable job.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8147-3615-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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