A cleareyed portrayal of a controversial woman.
After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher in “resoundingly middle class” Riceville, Iowa, devised an exercise intended to teach her students a “real, significant, and urgent” lesson about prejudice. As Bloom shows in his well-researched investigation, that lesson, in Riceville and beyond, became both admired and incendiary. Bloom, who teaches journalism at the University of Iowa, a few hours from Riceville, interviewed Elliott, her family and students, their parents, and many townspeople, beginning in 2004, when Elliott urged him to write her story—an invitation she eventually angrily withdrew. But Bloom was not dissuaded, intrigued by her career and missionary zeal as “an evangelist for the greater good.” After appearing on Johnny Carson’s late-night show, she quickly became a coveted speaker on racism, reprising for groups of adults the two-day exercise she had designed for her classroom. Dividing her students into blue eyes and brown eyes, she assigned blues to oppress browns on one day, then reversed the next day. The exercise, meant to demonstrate prejudice, caused a furor: Some third graders were traumatized by the experience, feeling bullied and manipulated. Parents accused Elliott of fomenting hatred, and the more famous she became, the more they condemned her as an opportunist and con artist. “Elliott used her experiment to make herself better than the rest,” many believed. Seen as “a know-it-all motormouth” even before the publicity, Elliott was now characterized as narcissistic and exploitative. When her exercise became the subject of documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ABC, and PBS; when she participated in the Nixon White House Conference on Children; when she mounted a side career as a consultant and college lecturer, the town’s hatred deepened. Creating a balanced view of both his abrasive subject and her notorious experiment, Bloom discovered that the town’s feelings still burn.
A cleareyed portrayal of a controversial woman.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-520-38226-8
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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