Next book

OUTSIDE THE SOUTHERN MYTH

Faulkner scholar Polk's story pulls double duty as both personal history and a critical exploration of what he dubs the Southern Myth, which, he argues, has been perpetuated by both scholars and the media. One's burden as a Southerner, he asserts, is to be quite often defined by a ``tragic sense of history,'' a reality, he feels, that has been ``imposed on me by a group photo.'' As a Southerner, he says, ``I look into the mirrors of southern history and fiction and do not see much that has any direct relation to my life.'' Polk examines aspects of his experience as a son, an academic, a musician, a member of the Baptist Church, and a contemporary, though passive, observer of the civil rights movement. A large chunk of the book is given over to the story of the author's complex relationship with the Baptist Church's equally complex theology. He anatomizes himself as someone who early accepted, then abandoned, a calling to the pulpit. Polk will neither embrace nor repudiate the faith, though he clearly considers himself a survivor of what he describes as the loss of self occasioned by Baptist theology and practice. His method is to tell more about southern Mississippi culture at large than about himself, and his frequent references to southern fiction as touchpoints for conclusions about his own world may leave stranded those readers who aren't familiar with the sources. More personable, on the other hand, are his recollections of his high-school marching band and of a beloved bandleader who gave Polk, along with the gift of music, the gift of possibility (``perhaps the best gift of all''); or the recollection of touching base with family, self, and the past at an uncle's funeral. Polk's descriptions of the southern manner do reveal aspects of who he is, but his book is more serviceable as cultural commentary than autobiography.

Pub Date: July 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-87805-979-2

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997

Next book

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Next book

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

Close Quickview