THE WOMEN

Name: THE WOMEN
Author: Hilton Als
ISBN: 0-374-29205-1

by Hilton Als ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1996

What makes this debut book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse,...

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Examining the images of "the Negress" and the "good Negro'' as they have shaped the lives of several remarkable men and women, including Fulbright scholar and "fag hag'' Dorothy Dean, poet Owen Dodson, and the author himself, this extended essay combines riveting subject matter with an original critical approach.

According to New Yorker staff writer Als, the image of the Negress, of a woman of color living out a clichéd life of poverty, self-abnegation, and Christian forbearance, has been a deforming and resilient presence in the American imagination for a long time. She is a familiar figure in popular culture. On a personal level, Als explores the history of (and his identification with) the Negress he knew most intimately, his mother, who donned a cap of smiling servitude when she emigrated to this country from Barbados and whose "long, slow, public death was an advertisement for the life she had lived.'' Dorothy Dean, on the other hand, was a brilliant and difficult woman who graduated from Radcliffe in the 1950s, at a time when black women still had few choices. Dean attempted to subvert the image of the self-sacrificing Negress, but could never entirely escape it. Greatly gifted but filled with doubt, she came to New York, sampled and abandoned a series of professions, and surrounded herself with upper-class white gay men, fortifying her self-hatred with relationships based on sarcasm and gossip. Als also writes about the sexual relationship he had from ages 15 to 19 with the poet Owen Dodson, who was older than his mother "but just as committed to the experience of pain.'' Dodson sacrificed his wit on the page for the acceptable oppressed voice of the New (and publishable) Negro and drank himself into a self-destructive old age.

What makes this debut book so compelling is the author's ability to combine extreme honesty with sharp critical discourse, his willingness to explore the shadows of complex lives, including his own, that challenge clichés about race and gender without ever sacrificing intellectual rigor.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-374-29205-1

Page Count: 200

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | LGBTQ | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

- BOOK REVIEW
MY PINUP
by Hilton Als

- BOOK REVIEW
WHITE GIRLS
by Hilton Als

- PERSPECTIVES
Our Books, Ourselves

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.