A panoramic yet intimate depiction of a family experiencing radical social changes.
An African American author and artist recounts her compelling story of growing up in Selma, Alabama, during the height of the civil rights movement.
Brown, who was born in the early 1950s, the second youngest of five siblings, came of age during a time of tremendous social upheaval. She begins her remembrance of the Selma of her tween years by highlighting the love and mutual support that existed within the Black community. This love is particularly evident in her interactions with her siblings. As well as relating memories of events that made the national news, she shares many touching anecdotes of family, church, and school life. While loved ones tried to shield her from the bitter impact of racism, several incidents she witnessed and experienced with White people in her town juxtapose the two distinct Selmas in existence. She had a front-row seat to the ways many Black residents supported Martin Luther King Jr. and others fighting for civil rights; others thought he was stirring up trouble and wanted nothing to do with protests. Through these stories, readers are introduced to the highs and lows of African American life in the Jim Crow South. Brown uses language effectively to bring the times to life, and emerging from the retelling of her history are portraits of people who shaped her thought patterns and ways of being in her formative years.
A panoramic yet intimate depiction of a family experiencing radical social changes. (Memoir. 12-16)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-39023-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Fans of all things martial will echo his “HOOYAH!”—but the troubled aftermath comes in for some attention too.
Abridged but not toned down, this young-readers version of an ex-SEAL sniper’s account (SEAL Team Six, 2011) of his training and combat experiences in Operation Desert Storm and the first Battle of Mogadishu makes colorful, often compelling reading.
“My experiences weren’t always enjoyable,” Wasdin writes, “but they were always adrenaline-filled!” Not to mention testosterone-fueled. He goes on to ascribe much of his innate toughness to being regularly beaten by his stepfather as a child and punctuates his passage through the notoriously hellacious SEAL training with frequent references to other trainees who fail or drop out. He tears into the Clinton administration (whose “support for our troops had sagged like a sack of turds”), indecisive commanders and corrupt Italian “allies” for making such a hash of the entire Somalian mission. In later chapters he retraces his long, difficult physical and emotional recovery from serious wounds received during the “Black Hawk Down” operation, his increasing focus on faith and family after divorce and remarriage and his second career as a chiropractor.
Fans of all things martial will echo his “HOOYAH!”—but the troubled aftermath comes in for some attention too. (acronym/ordinance glossary, adult level reading list) (Memoir. 12-14)Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01643-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A solid and captivating look at these remarkable pioneers of modern fiction.
The wild freedom of the imagination and the heart, and the tragedy of lives ended just as success is within view—such a powerful story is that of the Brontë children.
Reef’s gracefully plotted, carefully researched account focuses on Charlotte, whose correspondence with friends, longer life and more extensive experience outside the narrow milieu of Haworth, including her acquaintance with the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who became her biographer, revealed more of her personality. She describes the Brontë children’s early losses of their mother and then their two oldest siblings, conveying the imaginative, verbally rich life of children who are essentially orphaned but share both the wild countryside and the gifts of story. Brother Branwell’s tragic struggle with alcohol and opium is seen as if offstage, wounding to his sisters and his father but sad principally because he never found a way to use literature to save himself. Reef looks at the 19th-century context for women writers and the reasons that the sisters chose to publish only under pseudonyms—and includes a wonderful description of the encounter in which Anne and Charlotte revealed their identities to Charlotte’s publisher. She also includes brief, no-major-spoilers summaries of the sisters’ novels, inviting readers to connect the dots and to understand how real-life experience was transformed into fiction.
A solid and captivating look at these remarkable pioneers of modern fiction. (notes and a comprehensive bibliography) (Biography. 12-16)Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-57966-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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