A frank, thoroughly contextualized portrayal of Black teen motherhood.
A memoir and activist call to action from a Black entrepreneur who got pregnant during her senior year of high school.
As Lewis notes early on, she never doubted that she was headed for college. She was an excellent student, and both she and her parents had high expectations for her future. However, her whirlwind romance with Rakheim led to an unplanned pregnancy, which she discovered a few months before graduation. As she recounts, her mother was gravely disappointed, and her father was unresponsive. To avoid her parents' disapproval, Lewis moved in with Rakheim, who, despite his troubled past, made her feel loved as “a young woman who belonged to someone special.” The author graduated from high school, but a lack of economic opportunity, financial safety nets, and family support meant that the couple struggled with homelessness, food insecurity, and overwhelming poverty. Unfortunately, the combination of economic stress and immaturity turned their relationship toxic, and Lewis had to leave. Throughout her pregnancy and new motherhood, the author never gave up on her dream of attending college, and she went on to excel at the College of William & Mary. After graduation, her experiences made it clear to her what she wanted to do with her life: help other teen parents go to college, just like she did. To that end, she founded a policy and advocacy organization called Generation Hope. “What if we said yes instead of no? That was the guiding star in the design of our program,” writes the author, whose voice shines with both vulnerability and wisdom. She does not portray herself simply as a victim or a hero but rather as an ambitious, loving, resourceful, Black single mother constantly fighting systemic racism. Throughout the text, she weaves in context drawn from research and her own personal experiences mentoring teen parents, articulating the racist systems that often keep teen parents uneducated, poor, and desperate.
A frank, thoroughly contextualized portrayal of Black teen motherhood.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5603-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
A sharp, entertaining view of the news media from one of its star players.
The veteran newscaster reflects on her triumphs and hardships, both professional and private.
In this eagerly anticipated memoir, Couric (b. 1957) transforms the events of her long, illustrious career into an immensely readable story—a legacy-preserving exercise, for sure, yet judiciously polished and insightful, several notches above the fray of typical celebrity memoirs. The narrative unfolds through a series of lean chapters as she recounts the many career ascendency steps that led to her massively successful run on the Today Show and comparably disappointing stints as CBS Evening News anchor, talk show host, and Yahoo’s Global News Anchor. On the personal front, the author is candid in her recollections about her midlife adventures in the dating scene and deeply sorrowful and affecting regarding the experience of losing her husband to colon cancer as well as the deaths of other beloved family members, including her sister and parents. Throughout, Couric maintains a sharp yet cool-headed perspective on the broadcast news industry and its many outsized personalities and even how her celebrated role has diminished in recent years. “It’s AN ADJUSTMENT when the white-hot spotlight moves on,” she writes. “The ego gratification of being the It girl is intoxicating (toxic being the root of the word). When that starts to fade, it takes some getting used to—at least it did for me.” Readers who can recall when network news coverage and morning shows were not only relevant, but powerfully influential forces will be particularly drawn to Couric’s insights as she tracks how the media has evolved over recent decades and reflects on the negative effects of the increasing shift away from reliable sources of informed news coverage. The author also discusses recent important cultural and social revolutions, casting light on issues of race and sexual orientation, sexism, and the predatory behavior that led to the #MeToo movement. In that vein, she expresses her disillusionment with former co-host and friend Matt Lauer.
A sharp, entertaining view of the news media from one of its star players.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-53586-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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