In brief, then, a vivid, panoramic text that documents in telling detail the roots of an epic, many-splendored cause.
An affecting, wide-ranging evocation of a turbulent decade when the civil-rights movement launched its fiercely determined, largely nonviolent battle for America's social conscience and soul.
A sometime magazine writer/editor with one novel (The Empire Blues, 1981) and a ghosted sports bio to his credit, Branch provides introductory perspectives on the Deep South's black churches—where the cause of desegregation was nurtured to the accompaniment of animating anthems, prayers, and sermons. In this first volume of a two-part work, though, he focuses on the period that began with Martin Luther King's 1954 arrival as pastor of Montgomery's upscale Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and ended with the 1963 assassination of JFK. In what he styles a narrative biographical history, the author recalls the economic boycotts, demonstrations, jailings, financial woes, judicial decisions, political maneuverings, internal dissensions, and vicious reactions that marked the early stages of blacks' first organized efforts to achieve equal rights in the face of entrenched racism. Cutting back and forth between the distinctly different worlds of black and white leaders, Branch provides warts-and-all portraits of those who played key roles in the long-running drama. King claims the heart of this account. But the author also profiles Ralph Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, J. Edgar Hoover, JFK and his brother Robert, Stanley Levinson, John Lewis, Robert Moses, George Wallace, and a host of other principals. Covered as well are less celebrated participants—including the estimable Septima Clark, who once reminded Andrew Young that it might be wise to share the lot of the hungry volunteers he recruited and bused about for confrontations with recalcitrant municipal authorities. Nor does Branch shrink from harsh judgments. At the close, for instance, he reports without disputing King's belief that Kennedy's death was a blessing for the civil-rights campaign, which might otherwise have stalled.
In brief, then, a vivid, panoramic text that documents in telling detail the roots of an epic, many-splendored cause.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1988
ISBN: 0671687425
Page Count: 1132
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1988
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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