One of the most candid and lucent books on race in this or any other year.
Powerful, wrenching story of a racial killing during the author’s North Carolina childhood.
Tyson (African-American Studies/University of Wisconsin–Madison) was only ten in 1970, when a young black husband and father was savagely beaten and then shot to death in Oxford, North Carolina, by some white men who claimed he had insulted one of their women. The killers were subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury. The author artfully weaves together a number of stories in this account. We hear about his own family, going back several generations but with major attention devoted to Tyson’s father, a liberal white preacher in Oxford who had an admirable record of working to improve race relations, though his son fondly chides him for the subconsciously racist notion that the goal of the civil-rights movement was to make black people more like whites. Tyson also sketches the histories of the victim, the killers, and the leaders of Oxford’s white and black communities. He scathingly depicts the dilatory police and the risible, ridiculous trial. He writes about the civil-rights movement’s high and low points (the 1970 shootings at Jackson State included among the latter). And he chronicles his tumultuous coming of age. Tyson ran away from home at 17, but a lovely passage describes his father finding him walking along a rural road, holding him tight, and praying for him. After several years of indulgence in drugs and general dissipation, the author decided to enroll in college: “And the first thing I did as a twenty-four-year-old freshman was to drive to Oxford, North Carolina, to ask Robert Teel why he’d killed Henry Marrow.” Tyson returned again as a graduate student and then as a historian to research the story that inhabits the heart of this remarkable work: a reminder that the struggle for racial equality prompted vileness and violence on all sides.
One of the most candid and lucent books on race in this or any other year.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61058-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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