by Ron Gosbee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2024
A powerful, firsthand indictment of the Canadian government’s mistreatment of Indigenous children.
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A survivor of an Indian Residential School in Canada shares his story in this debut memoir.
While the story of Canada’s “hellish system of religious schooling” has made international headlines (and even provoked a historic apology from Pope Francis), Gosbee asserts that there is more to the story that still needs to be told. Living in Northern Ontario in the 1950s, Gosbee and his sisters were among the few white children who attended the now infamous St. Anne’s Indian Residential School. While the institution operated under a basic assumption of white cultural supremacy that presumed “the right to dominate and eliminate” Indigenous culture, the author was not spared from the psychological damage inflicted by the school. Punishments witnessed by the young Gosbee included striking children on the head with shoes. The author’s recollections are supplemented by memories shared by his sisters as well as dormmate Tony Tourville, who speaks bluntly about sexual abuse and additional experiences of Indigenous children the author was not privy to. While Gosbee acknowledges the presence of “good priests, good nuns, and good teachers,” he emphasizes how the institution’s management systematically worked to push out empathetic figures and promote “mean, controlling teachers” in their stead. The book’s harrowing narrative is conveyed in a conversational, no-nonsense style in prose that pays close attention to vocabulary; influenced by Tourville’s reflections, Gosbee notes how even the words “school” or “dorm supervisor” sanitize a more sordid environment (he suggests “prison” and “prison guard” as more accurate descriptors). The text is accompanied by a wealth of black-and-white photographs that contributes to the book’s haunting tone. In addition to chronicling his childhood experiences, Gosbee surveys the school’s lasting impact in the present day and includes a foreword written by Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian House of Commons who has been an outspoken advocate on behalf of Indian Residential School victims.
A powerful, firsthand indictment of the Canadian government’s mistreatment of Indigenous children.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781039198333
Page Count: 312
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
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New York Times Bestseller
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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