An elegantly written memoir that reflects more on world history than on personal history.
Marshall (Literature and Culture/New York Univ.; The Fisher King, 2000, etc.) recounts her coming of age in Brooklyn, the Caribbean and Africa.
She opens with “Homage to Mr. Hughes”—poet Langston, that is, who became Marshall’s mentor and friend after they met at a party celebrating the release of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959. Hughes subsequently invited the novice writer to accompany him on a cultural tour of Europe. Marshall’s warm, reverent portrait includes charming anecdotes about his affinity for nightlife and excerpts from his handwritten notes, always penned in green ink. Subsequent chapters are adapted from a series of lectures the author delivered at Harvard on “Bodies of Water.” Marshall focuses on the three that made up the triangular slave-trade route: the James River, the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. She mingles the history of each with the chronicle of her life and development as a writer. Her parents were from Barbados, a principal way station in the slave trade. They moved to Brooklyn, where Marshall grew up in a close-knit West Indian community and first discovered her passion for books. She drew inspiration for her early writing from Barbados and used the advance for Brown Girl to spend a year in the island nation revising her manuscript and reconnecting with her parents’ native ground. After receiving a 1962 Guggenheim grant she spent another year in the Caribbean, this time on Grenada and its tiny satellite island, where she attended an annual Big Drum/Nation Dance ceremony. The final chapter describes FESTAC ’77, a cultural festival that brought together in Nigeria artists from the entire African continent and from the diaspora to the Americas. Marshall and other Americans were welcomed as Omowalies (Yoruba for “the child has returned”). This sense of a far-flung African community informs the author’s lush descriptions and informative historical accounts, though these later portions of the book lack the approachable intimacy of her opening homage to Hughes.
An elegantly written memoir that reflects more on world history than on personal history.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-465-01359-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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