A compelling story that shows how the American Dream can transmute into the American Nightmare.
A former slave, Blanche Kelso Bruce, becomes a U.S. Senator (1875-81), a man of wealth and prestige; a couple of generations later, all is gone.
Graham, who has published previously on race and class (Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, 1999, etc.), ends with a sad image. At a 2002 unveiling of a portrait of Sen. Bruce in the U.S. Capitol, only one member of the populous Bruce family attended. (Some, we learn, are apparently passing for white.) The author charts the spectacular rise and fall of the Bruces. Born in 1841, Bruce moved around a bit with his white owners, who were involved both in tobacco and cotton. After his manumission (the details of which are sketchy), Bruce barely escaped Quantrill’s raiders in Kansas and, after a brief stop at Oberlin College (he ran out of money, didn’t graduate), ended up in Mississippi, where he profited mightily from Reconstruction and from the recent enfranchisement of freed slaves. After holding a few offices (including county sheriff), Bruce won the Senate election in the state legislature and headed off to Washington. He married a well-to-do woman from a prominent black family and with his own healthy investments in Mississippi real estate, they lived well and sent their son, Roscoe, to Phillips Exeter and Harvard, where he excelled. After the senator died, both his widow and son worked for Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. But Roscoe, says Graham, was an arrogant man who preferred the company of whites, and he soon fell from grace (he’d once dined with the Rockefellers). The fortune melted away in the next generation—as did the prestige. Roscoe’s son (also named Roscoe) served a prison sentence; a daughter passed for white; a third son also had legal difficulties. Graham’s research is impressive and comprehensive—though some disjointedness, abruptness and occasional omissions suggest substantial textual cuts.
A compelling story that shows how the American Dream can transmute into the American Nightmare.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-018412-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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