Gracelessly written, but indispensable to students of Ellison, Oklahoma City in the 1920s, or Harlem in the ’40s.
Painstaking biography covering the first half of the noted African-American writer’s life, through his acceptance of the National Book Award in 1953.
Ellison (1914–94) grew up in Oklahoma City. His beloved father died when Ralph was three; thereafter he shuttled from address to address with his mother, whose ferocious self-respect made both employment and housing opportunities precarious. The intelligent boy’s struggles with poverty and racial strife were mitigated by exposure to a good library, a visionary music teacher, and exceptional local jazz. Later, he won a scholarship from Tuskegee Institute's prestigious music school to study trumpet and conducting. The need for money led him in 1936 to New York, where he was introduced to Langston Hughes and within weeks had shifted his orientation to literature and left-wing politics. With Hughes as his mentor, Ellison launched himself in literary and political circles both up- and downtown. He served as editor of The Negro Quarterly and consolidated his reputation as a critic with his advocacy of Richard Wright's Native Son. Jackson (English/Howard Univ.) illuminates the complicated ways in which Ellison's career was shaped by his relationship with Wright, with whom he shared a rural background, modernist tastes, and an ambivalent relationship with the Communist Party, and whose success spurred Ellison's desire to write fiction. After WWII, his second wife Fanny's income and companionship allowed him to concentrate on the protean novel that eventually became Invisible Man, the masterpiece that catapulted him to fame in 1952. Jackson's scholarship is thorough, his insights valuable, but his prose, marred by idiomatic blunders and muddy sentence structure, is only just adequate to convey the complex temperament of his subject. Ambitious, original, dedicated, and lucky, Ellison seems at once isolated from and excessively dependent on his professional milieu; despite the biographer’s emphasis on effort and integrity rewarded, sadness and desperation haunt this life.
Gracelessly written, but indispensable to students of Ellison, Oklahoma City in the 1920s, or Harlem in the ’40s.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-35414-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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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