A cogently narrated personal exploration of the pain of raising black boys in a society that the author sees as fearing black men and indifferent to their survival. In the face of chilling statistics (the leading cause of death among American black males under 21 is homicide), novelist Golden (Creative Writing/George Mason Univ.; ed. Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues, 1993, etc.) examines her tumultuous experience raising her son, Michael. She begins motherhood in Nigeria, having moved there to be with her Nigerian-born husband, Femi, and his family. But as an educated woman and a feminist, she is unable to reconcile her love of Femi's caring, tribal community with its treatment of women. She also struggles with Femi's own unwillingness to see their marriage as an equal partnership, and after a year she leaves him. After returning to the United States, Golden grapples with the painful realization that, while as a woman her options are much better in the US than in Nigeria, her son's status is far more precarious in her native country. In that context, she explores her decisions to send him away from the violence of Washington, D.C., to a boarding school outside Philadelphia, and to encourage his relationship with his Nigerian father, first through letters and early-morning international phone calls, and eventually through a visit to Africa. Occasionally, Golden descends to easy polemics about race in America, which overwhelms the specificity of her own narrative and her personal experiences of grief and fear. But for the most part, she admirably navigates between the intimate and the sociological. Though her prose is not always engaging or original, Golden brings an articulate and much-needed perspective to the current feminist discourse on raising sons and to the issue of the ``endangered'' black male.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47302-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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