Indefatigable research and lucid prose combine to produce a book whose importance cannot be overstated. (16 halftones, not...
Rigorously researched and creatively imagined biography of an African-American who fought in the American Revolution, amassed a small fortune, and fought slavery and racial discrimination.
Rediscovering the life of the once-prominent Forten, largely unknown today, Winch (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston) has achieved something quite profound and affecting. Born in the fall of 1766, his name later changed from the common slave name “Fortune,” he was a fortunate child in some ways. His grandfather had somehow achieved liberation from slavery, so James Forten was a free man from birth. He followed his father into the sail-making trade and, after serving on a privateer, enduring seven months of captivity aboard a prison hulk, and living briefly in London, he returned as an apprentice to the sail loft where his father had labored. Winch’s prodigious research is evident in the detail she supplies about 18th-century sail-making. Here, as elsewhere, when documentation is missing, she has recreated her subject’s world so thoroughly that we know what he must have been doing. After 13 years, Forten took over the business. Noted for his probity as well as his enormous skill, he thrived; blacks and whites worked alongside one another with efficiency, if not affection. Forten soon began to diversify, purchasing real estate and lending money. Winch follows his financial career and chronicles his increasing activism in civic, educational, and religious affairs. He administered his local church, helped create black schools, wrote piercing essays, and spoke eloquently against the “voluntary” emigration of blacks to Liberia, though for a time he favored the genuinely voluntary resettlements in Haiti. Friends and colleagues included the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and Forten died one of the most respected men in Philadelphia. In 1842, thousands of black and white mourners attended his funeral or watched its solemn progression.
Indefatigable research and lucid prose combine to produce a book whose importance cannot be overstated. (16 halftones, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-508691-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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