Suskind, a journalist, tells the story of one African-American youth’s rise from poverty-stricken Anacostia, in southeast Washington D.C., to the ivied halls of Brown University. In 1995, Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize for two articles he wrote for the Wall Street Journal on Cedric Jennings, an African- American student at one of the poorest schools in the capital, whose studiousness and ambition earn him a place in MIT’s summer program for minority youth. Suskind’s book expands on that story, extending it to Cedric’s admission to Brown University and first year there. Suskind weaves interviews with Cedric, his family, teachers, and friends into a narrative that shows the challenges facing a ghetto youth bent on academic achievement. Paradoxically, both the inner-city code of youthful male behavior and the teachings of the Pentecostal church Cedric attends with his mother conspire to discourage intellectual distinction. The drama of the story is in the mediations Cedric learns to make between the inherited and the chosen, yet “unseen,” parts of his life. Suskind plays to the sense of closure and, in this case, a happy ending the very format of a book (unlike a newspaper article) encourages, but cannot really achieve here, since Cedric’s life at college, and beyond, is still in process. By the end of the book, the young man has forgiven his high school nemeses, been reconciled with his absent father, and found social acceptance at Brown. Left hanging is the question of the ultimate success of Cedric’s quest, which he is still only beginning. One senses the existence of conflicts unresolved and questions unanswered. This engaging success story leaves behind a troubling aftertaste of personal and social wounds that appear to have been too artfully healed. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: May 27, 1998
ISBN: 0-7679-0125-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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