A passionate, perturbing account of one man's Herculean efforts to reach a generation of disenfranchised black youth in the ghettos of San Francisco and beyond. A junior high school teacher and co-founder of the Omega Boys Club, Marshall provides a penetrating critique of black urban America and the values that define the lives of its youth. In a society characterized by guns, unemployment, and crack, young children, too often abandoned by drug-addicted mothers and absentee fathers, seek their surrogate families in street gangs that only wreak further havoc on their lives. Instead of forming friendships, these young people bond together in what Marshall calls ``fearships,'' in which horrendous crimes are committed for the sake of ``preserving one's reputation and not being labeled as a punk.'' The dehumanization of these young people, contends Marshall, is reinforced by street language: Referring to themselves as ``niggas'' and the women in their lives as ``bitches'' and ``hoes,'' young black urban males broadcast their sense of worthlessness. Marshall manages to reach even the most hard-core of these youth by appealing to whatever sense of pride and self-worth may still be intact. Reading the writings of Malcolm X with them is his prerequisite for understanding the institutionalized racism that has allowed—and possibly encouraged—young African-Americans to destroy one another. The author wants black youth to take full responsibility, to rehabilitate rather than destroy themselves. Marshall succeeds, according to testimony from his young friends, because he values them when they have been demeaned by everyone else. He reaches the ``hard rocks'' because of his relentless faith in their underlying goodness. The book's one glaring omission involves Latino youth, whose similarly shattered lives are not considered here. Interspersed with riveting first-hand accounts by the youth portrayed in this book, Street Soldier poses a challenge to all Americans.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-31430-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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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