Engaging, intelligent, and likely to be of much interest to general readers, as well as of value in courses in American...
A finely rendered portrait of two Southern abolitionists and civil-rights activists, and of the time in which they lived.
Journalist Perry (Conceived in Liberty, 1997, etc.) traces the evolution of the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, from antebellum Charleston liberals to influential Philadelphia reformists over the space of a few short years, sent there by a voice from heaven that instructed the Quaker spinster Sarah to “Go north. Go north.” Their abandonment of their home was a long time coming, but no surprise: Perry relates that young Sarah’s father caught her teaching a slave how to read, “in violation of the family’s traditions, Southern customs, and the strict slave codes of the state,” and that Angelina was quick to join her sister in rejecting the traditions of their state, family, and class. Their efforts, though little celebrated in standard texts of 19th-century history, were of great importance in forging the abolitionist cause through the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. More than reporting the details of the Grimké sisters’ lives and deeds, interesting enough though they are, Perry offers a learned survey of American social history in the mid-19th century, providing a vivid account of the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening and connecting the quest of their contemporaries for earthly salvation to the sisters’ thwarted determination to lead lives of religious devotion. Perry also does a nice job of introducing what would become a life-altering discovery for the sisters after the Civil War: the fact that their brother had fathered children with a “free person of color,” two of whom would, with the sisters’ help, go on to become important figures in the post-Reconstruction civil-rights movement.
Engaging, intelligent, and likely to be of much interest to general readers, as well as of value in courses in American history, women’s studies, and African American studies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03011-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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