Inspiring reading for aspiring journalists and students of civil rights.
A pioneering newspaper editor illuminates the importance of racial diversity in newsrooms and the difficulties of achieving that diversity, especially for black women.
In a memoir that runs from her birth in 1949 to 2019, Lloyd (co-editor: The Edge of Change: Women in the Twenty-First-Century Press, 2009) offers hundreds of anecdotes and scenarios about how she managed to ascend to the top spots at major newspapers in an industry dominated by white males. The author had one advantage that many black women of her generation lacked due to pervasive racial segregation and gender inequities: She was born into a well-educated, economically comfortable family. Her upbringing—mostly in Savannah, Georgia—qualifies as unconventional (no spoilers here), but she never lacked for support from her close-knit relatives. After excelling in a severely segregated public school system, Lloyd entered Spelman College in Atlanta, an elite liberal arts institution for black women. There, she expanded her horizons by mingling with classmates who, unlike her, had attended schools with nonblack students and teachers. As the author notes, she had never crossed paths with whites in her daily life. After graduating from Spelman, Lloyd knew she wanted to become a journalist, but such a career seemed highly unlikely for a black woman. Though newspapers often publicly advocated for integration throughout society, their editors and publishers rarely practiced what they preached. Impressively, Lloyd managed to break through. With a combination of her unquestionable talent and fortuitous timing, she broke a series of glass ceilings until she became executive editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. Along the way, she had also achieved influential editing positions at the Washington Post, Miami Herald, and USA Today, the flagship of the Gannett chain, a company that was ahead of its competitors in its practice of promoting women. Though Lloyd is not always self-effacing about her accomplishments, it’s not bragging if you have done it—and she has done a lot.
Inspiring reading for aspiring journalists and students of civil rights.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-58838-407-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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