For poet and novelist Walker (The Color Purple), racism is like the "creeping kudzu vine that swallows whole forests and abandoned houses; if you don't keep pulling up the roots it will grow back faster than you can destroy it." Her own answer is to downplay revolutionary rhetoric in favor of the "least glamourous stuff"—practical organizing and community service. For the black writer, this also means working "to create and to preserve what was created before him." And so in many of these subtle 1966-82 essays, Walker explores key figures—Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston. She admires Hurston's "sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings," as well as her personal zest and style. Walker traces her own interest in writing to a disfiguring childhood accident which left her timid and withdrawn. "I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out." Patience would be necessary in the Sixties, when her work was dismissed by black reviewers "because of my life style, a euphemism for my interracial marriage." And it would steady her during the writing of The Color Purple, for which she retreated to a country home in northern California—where reluctant characters crystallized. "And no wonder: it looked a lot like the town in Georgia most of them were from, only it was more beautiful and the local swimming was not segregated." In her writing Walker strives to maintain "an awareness of and openness to mystery, which, to me, is deeper than any politics, race, or geographical location." Thus, she finds inspiration too in Flannery O'Connor. "Essential O'Conner is not about race at all. . .If it can be said to be 'about' anything, then it is. . . about the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don't have a chance of spiritual growth without it." But she is also drawn to the earlier generations of anonymous black women, who "handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read." Thoughtful, intelligent, resonant musings.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1983
ISBN: 0156028646
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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