A tumultuous life rendered in never-dull, enlightening fashion.
Jackson (English and History/Johns Hopkins Univ.; My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family After the Civil War, 2012, etc.) takes a confusing, twisted tale of a writer and lays it out in a readable, straightforward biography.
Chester B. Himes (1909-1984) was the child of teachers, and his mother home-schooled her children as they moved among Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri. She impressed upon her children, especially fair-skinned Chester, that they all had fine white blood. With middle-class black pretensions his lifelong scapegoat, Himes rebelled against his mother’s racist attitude to the darker of her own race. After a chemistry experiment blinded his brother, he lost his best companion and competition. In 1926, Himes fell down an elevator shaft, breaking his back, an accident that produced a small income from worker’s compensation. With acceptance to Ohio State, his anger at racism manifested itself, and his time was spent gambling, drinking, and taking drugs. Back in Cleveland, he was arrested for robbery and sentenced to 20 years in prison. There, he taught himself short story writing and wrote with his rare perspective on black life from American society’s margins. His prison stories were published widely, but he was still learning. Paroled in 1936, he married and moved to Los Angeles, polishing his ability to reproduce speech and identify black divisiveness. Fighting with publishers and paranoid about royalties that never came, he took his book advance and moved to France. While publishers in Paris were even tighter with royalties, Himes found life easier, cheaper, and less racist. Still, as Jackson clearly demonstrates, he couldn’t sell his books in the 1940s because of his politics nor in the ’50s because of their sexual content. Eventually, he developed his most profitable work in the Harlem detective stories about Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. He was able to discover his answer to racism in humor mingled with violence.
A tumultuous life rendered in never-dull, enlightening fashion.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-06389-9
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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