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THE HANDS OF PEACE

Name: THE HANDS OF PEACE
Author: Marione Ingram
ISBN: 978-1-63220-289-5

A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR’S FIGHT FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH

by Marione Ingram ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 14, 2015

A freedom fighter’s passionate memoir from the trenches.

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A victim of Nazi terror who became a Freedom Summer volunteer in rural Mississippi re-creates the conviction of the activists’ early civil rights struggles.

The author of an earlier memoir of her half-Jewish family’s persecution in Germany during World War II (The Hands of War, 2013), Ingram focuses here on her experience in her 20s, when she was caught up in issues of social justice first in New York City and then in Washington, D.C., and Mississippi. Having been imbued by her atheist father with the “sacred and secular duty to oppose racism wherever [she] encountered it,” Ingram was deeply troubled by the enormous chasm in inequality between blacks and whites in New York, where she lived and worked in her early 20s. Befriending African-Americans yet not allowed to take them to the same establishments or live in the same buildings, the author was outraged by the racial discrimination prevalent even among so-called enlightened people. With her new husband, Daniel, a Southern-born journalist of labor-relations law, she moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. The group worked for the integration of institutions and against housing discrimination, which, as Ingram discovered, was the most pernicious form of racial inequality. As part of the circle of activists, she chronicles meeting many of the lights of the movement and working for the enormous success of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963. The next summer, on the bus back from the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, Fannie Lou Hamer convinced the author she should go to rural Mississippi to register voters and start a Freedom School. Throughout this brief book, Ingram’s anecdotes are charming, and her memories of a deeply traumatized rural South provide a significant, moving record.

A freedom fighter’s passionate memoir from the trenches.

Pub Date: July 14, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-63220-289-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.