Provides unique insights into a community intent on moving forward.
A former gang leader and an academic researcher team up to bring about change in a struggling community.
The project emerged from the efforts of “Big Mike” Cummings, a former drug dealer and gang member working to try to keep the peace in Watts, South Los Angeles. Seeking to create a support group for fathers living in the Jordan Downs housing project, Cummings reached out to gang expert and crisis interventionist Leap (Jumped In: What Gangs Taught Me about Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption, 2012). A self-described “anthropologist with a perpetual identity crisis,” her 20-plus years teaching at UCLA’s School of Public Affairs, along with her reputation for a willingness to get involved at the grass-roots level, made her indispensable for the project. This book combines sociology, tough-love prescriptions, evidence of genuine growth (and the growing pains that come with it) and an eyes-wide-open account of men struggling to be better. Despite years of experience researching gangs from a sociological perspective, Leap discovered that gang culture always has surprises in store. Her concern about a smart, gentle young man living in Jordan Downs proved to be off-base; since he is smart and attends school, the local gangbangers leave him alone. The author explores the mix of admiration and distrust that the men in the group have for Big Mike. She marvels at their gradual shift from using the group time as a sounding board for airing multiple grievances to beginning to collaborate on how to mentor younger men who are trying to make sense of their teenage lives. Repeatedly, the men have been challenged to see things differently while also showing Leap that some of her ideas about what constitutes “better” do not always match up with the hopes of the group.
Provides unique insights into a community intent on moving forward.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1452-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
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 lynching—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.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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