Thoughtfully provocative reading.
The story of a mutually transformative friendship between the author and a black student she met as a Teach for America volunteer in Arkansas.
Kuo (Race, Law, and Society/American Univ. of Paris) knew that her post-college plan to teach underprivileged students “American history through black literature” in the tiny Mississippi Delta town of Helena went against what her ambitious Taiwanese parents wanted for her. Yet the need to obey the dictates of a strong social conscience was stronger than the desire for material gain and success. Once in Arkansas, Kuo quickly discovered that her assignment at an underfunded alternative middle school was far more difficult than she had imagined. Most of her students had never encountered an Asian person before, and in her more disillusioned moments, the author found herself thinking that she was just a “cliché [of the] middle class outsider.” Her friendship with 15-year-old Patrick Browning, a quiet young black man in her eighth-grade class, became her saving grace. Patrick thrived under Kuo’s tutelage, revealing a profound sensitivity and intelligence that moved the young teacher. Acceptance to law school took Kuo to Harvard, where, during the course of her studies, she learned that Patrick was in jail, charged with murder. Desperate to find a way to help her former student, she put off building the legal career she now realized inspired no passion to return to Arkansas. As the author helped Patrick’s lawyer find justice for her client, she visited Patrick—who committed the crime in order to protect a family member—in jail every day. The two read classics by such writers as Frederick Douglass, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, and Walt Whitman while confronting painful questions about race and belonging. In the process, Kuo helped Patrick come to terms with his troubled past and learn to look toward the future with greater hope. Honest, thoughtful, and humane, Kuo’s book is not only a testament to a remarkable friendship, but a must-read for anyone interested in social justice and race in America.
Thoughtfully provocative reading.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9731-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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