Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
by Bonnie Jo Campbell
(Norton, $25.95, 272 pages)
Who is this author?
A Michigan native, Bonnie Jo Campbell earned a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1984, an MA in mathematics in 1995 and an MFA in creative writing in 1998 from Western Michigan University. She has traveled with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, and has organized adventure bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and Russia. And she has written well-regarded books, including Once Upon a River, Q Road, Women and Other Animals and American Salvage, a story collection that was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. She has contributed to many literary journals and her short story, “The Smallest Man in the World, won a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Kalamazoo and teaches at Pacific University.
What is this book about?
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters continues her sharp and sympathetic chronicling of the lives of rural American women whose working-class lives are difficult, to say the least. Tough and rough, but vulnerable to the brutal men in their lives and tangled in complicated mother-daughter relationships, the women she portrays here include a new bride who believes her dead ex-boyfriend has returned – but as a mongrel dog, an abused woman who gets revenge on her dying husband, a gang-rape victim, a woman whose smother-love drives away those she most wants to hold close, a woman dying of cancer who reflects on her life and others who are bloodied but not completely bowed.
Why you’ll like it:
Campbell’s stories are strong and disturbing stuff, but leavened with her quirky humor, which makes them all the more powerful. Her deep grasp of the dark side of rural life enables her to make her flawed characters feel very real and very much worth meeting on the page. For those who may wonder why some poor and disadvantaged people behave in self-destructive ways, here are stories full of insight that will engender empathy and understanding.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “Campbell’s stories are populated mainly by country dwellers, farmers and blue-collar workers who live in semi-isolation near Kalamazoo, Mich., Campbell’s hometown. They coexist with animals as much as with other human beings, and like animals, they are adaptive and resilient. Campbell, who grew up on a farm, paints them with unpitying fascination…All of the protagonists of these stories are women, and Campbell would have us remember that with respect to relations between the sexes, brutality and violence are part of our animal legacy. Some of the freshest stories are ones in which she pursues this insight while allowing her absurdist humor free rein…Like the women in her stories, Campbell’s prose can be watchful and viscerally alive. It’s no accident that injuries and hospitals figure repeatedly here. She wants to drill down beneath the flesh, to hidden depths of feeling and being, to reservoirs of strength and power that these women hardly know are there.”
Says Publishers Weekly: “After 2011’s novel Once upon a River, National Book Award–finalist Campbell returns to the realm of food stamps, liquored nights, and deadbeat men in an aptly titled short story collection populated by beleaguered mothers and their tetchy, trouble-courting offspring. In “To You, as a Woman,” a gang-rape victim and single mother laments her later irresponsible choices and contemplates the fate of her two young children while waiting for STD lab results. The paranoid maternal figure in “Tell Yourself” drives away her new beau after wrongfully accusing him of showing an interest in her teenage daughter. In “My Dog Roscoe,” a hormonal and pregnant new bride imagines her dead ex-fiancé inhabiting the soul of a stray dog in need of adoption. The title story unfolds as a sprint-down-memory-lane rant from a hospice-bound, cancer-ridden woman to her daughter. “Forgive me, even if I can’t say I’m sorry,” she says—an apology uttered in one way or another by many of the mothers in this collection. Campbell has made a career chronicling the triumphs and hardships of the perpetually marginalized, with an acute talent for airing the dirty laundry of tough-as-nails, ill-treated women. And though this new batch traverses similar territory instead of, perhaps, something new, most of the stories succeed so thoroughly that it’s hard not to think: if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”
A starred review from Library Journal says: “Strong writing holds the readers’ attention in Campbell’s collection of dark, offbeat stories. In the title piece, the narrator, who has survived much sorrow through toughness, tells her life story from a hospice bed. Her dying wish is for her kin to make her funeral a real bash. In “My Dog Roscoe,” a woman suspects that a stray dog rescued by her husband is a reincarnation of her sexy former boyfriend, Oscar. . . . In “Daughters of the Animal Kingdom,” 47-year-old Jill is pregnant with her fifth child, her mother has cancer, her youngest daughter is also pregnant, and her marriage is on the rocks. She compares herself to a queen bee past her prime who can no longer cling to life. Throughout, mothers and daughters struggle with bad luck, bad choices, and bad men; there’s always an imbalance of power in their relationships, never in their favor. . . . Campbell tells bittersweet stories of unbearable heartache, sadness, and sometimes love.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “Campbell’s latest: a powerful but uneven collection focused on the experiences of working-class Michigan women. She covered much the same ground in American Salvage. . . but still has plenty of fresh insights, as evidenced in the collection’s three standout entries. The title story is a searing first-person monologue by a woman dying of lung cancer, talking back in her head to the reproachful, college-educated daughter who blames her for sharing her life with a parade of violent men who brutalized her children as well. . . . “A Multitude of Sins,” by contrast, is the scary but gratifying account of an abused wife who finally gets her own back with the mortally ill husband who can no longer hurt her. The most nuanced and complex tale gently profiles Sherry, who has spent years trying to create “Somewhere Warm” for her family, a refuge totally different from “the bitter place where Sherry grew up, where people humiliated one another, where the power of love did not hold sway.” Instead, her smothering embraces drive away her husband, her lover, and her angry teenage daughter, though a tender ending offers tentative hope. Campbell’s protagonists are tough but heartbreakingly vulnerable; an appalling number have been molested as children or raped as adults, and they rarely seek justice since nothing in their experiences suggests it’s attainable for them. The very modesty of their dreams . . . indicts the society from which they expect so little. A fine showcase for this talented writer’s ability to mingle penetrating character studies with quietly scathing depictions of hard-pressed lives.”
When is it available?
Tell your daughters and everyone else that this book is at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
This Old Man: All in Pieces
by Roger Angell
(Knopf Doubleday, $26.95, 320 pages)
Who is this author?
Roger Angell is 95 now, and he is still delighting readers. He is a senior fiction editor for The New Yorker, to which he first contributed in 1944, and began writing about sports for in 1962. He has also written in many other fields for the magazine: reportage, commentary, fiction, humor, film and book reviews, and its rollicking Christmas poem, an annual festival of name-dropping, called “Greetings, Friends!” His New Yorker connections run deep: his mother was Katharine Sergeant Angell White, The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, and his stepfather was the famous magazine essayist E. B. White. He was largely raised by his father, Ernest Angell, an attorney who went on to be the head of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Roger Angell has published 10 books, many about baseball, as well as the memoir, Let Me Finish. He has won a slew of major awards, including a Polk Award for Commentary; the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing; and the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given to writers by the Baseball Hall of Fame. His New Yorker piece “This Old Man” won the 2015 prize for Essays and Criticism awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors. He is the only writer ever elected to both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
What is this book about?
The book was inspired by Angell’s prize-winning essay, also titled This Old Man, which quickly became a classic disquisition on the joys and sadness of growing old. The book contains the essay, along with other Angell pieces: essays, letters, verse, book reviews, New Yorker Talk of the Town and Profile piece and much more. Pieces range from an account of Derek Jeter’s leaving the game to an all-dog opera to a letter to his son, this is a wonderful compendium of Angell’s fine writing.
Why you’ll like it:
Angell is such a witty, graceful and perceptive writer that no matter the particular subject, you will find yourself enjoying each piece in this collection. Given his age, his output is impressive, but the happy fact that he still writes with such authority and dexterity is thrilling. His age also gives him the advantage of perspective, which in his case engenders wisdom. This is a fine book for readers of any age.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “…there is a certain generosity operating here, an assumption of friendship between reader and writer, the way one is pleased to hear what a friend has to say no matter what the occasion. In inviting us to rummage through his literary files, Angell proves almost consistently engaging and companionable…For the most part…the pieces are kept brief. “The thoughts of age are short, short thoughts,” he apologizes. Nevertheless, we are grateful for [Angell's] perspective on the kingdom of old age and hope only to be as wise and realistic when we get there.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “The latest collection of writings from New Yorker fiction editor Angell is anchored by his much-lauded rumination on aging, “This Old Man.” At 94, Angell is a witness to history but hardly a relic of the past. He always seems to know when to drop a reference to Harry Potter or David “Big Papi” Ortiz. The book is filled with many of Angell’s timeless subjects: baseball; aging; his stepfather, E.B. White; and life inside the publication that has dominated his life. Just as he is adept at changing subjects, so is he at changing forms, including a little bit of everything in this collection—he calls the resulting mixture a dog’s breakfast. Angell is equally at ease writing annual Christmas poems, witty internal memos, letters, haiku, speeches, literary essays, and “casuals.” His tribute to John Updike, with whom he worked for decades, is a touching portrait of the man as both friend and literary legend. Having written for the New Yorker since 1944, during the tenure of its founder, Harold Ross, Angell can write about it with a true sense of the magazine’s history. There is a reason why nostalgia feels so comforting—and Angell represents the best sort of writing about the remembrance of things past.”
“[Angell’s] reflections and commentary brim with steadfast wisdom and are possibly more nuanced than ever. [T]his is a uniformly engaging and eloquent selection that attests to a full life well lived,” says the Chicago Tribune.
Kirkus’ starred review says: “A miscellany of memorable prose. The author of both fiction and nonfiction and recipient of numerous literary awards, joined the New Yorker in 1956, serving as fiction editor, reporter, movie and book reviewer, and commentator on life, art, and baseball. Now 93, he has gathered work from the last few decades into a volume notable for its grace, wit, and humanity. Among pieces long (a tribute to V.S. Pritchett) and short (a scattering of haiku) are many elegies for fellow writers: the meticulous work of his stepfather, E.B. White; the “murmurous eloquence” of John Hersey’s Hiroshima; John Updike, “a fabulous noticer and expander”; the gentle, romantic Donald Barthelme. Many other pieces celebrate friendships: with the irreverent Edith Oliver, the magazine’s theater and film critic; and Harold Ross, the New Yorker’s founder, who often “stalked the halls, hunched and scowling with the burden of his latest idea.” Being a fiction editor can be wearying, writes Angell, “but then here comes a story—maybe only a couple of paragraphs in that story—and you are knocked over. Your morning has been changed; you are changed.” An unpublished piece from 1995 recounts a fearsome airplane flight, when a storm raged nearby. “Nothing happened,” he says, except a reminder to the passengers “not to forget, not quite yet, the imperial beauty of that thunderstorm and the boring but generally ongoing solipsism of pure luck.” “Writing is a two-way process,” he wrote to fiction writer Bobbie Ann Mason, “and the hard part isn’t just getting in touch with oneself but keeping in touch with that reader out there, whoever he or she is, on whom all this thought and art and maybe genius will devolve.” As this ebullient and eloquent collection amply shows, Angell can deftly touch that reader, on whom he bestows this lovely gift.”
When is it available?
This excellent collection is at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
The Sellout
by Paul Beatty
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
He first gained recognition as a poet in 1990, having been crowned the first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Café, and then became a successful novelist. Paul Beatty grew up in West Los Angeles and now lives in New York City. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology from Boston University. His previous novels are Slumberland, Tuff, and The White Boy Shuffle and his and two poetry collections are Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He edited Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor, whose slyly provocative cover is a smiley face made from a curved slice of watermelon rind.
What is this book about?
It doesn’t get much more politically incorrect or comically outrageous than this: a young black urban farmer the “agrarian ghetto” of Dickens, just south of L.A. but no longer on any map, grows watermelons and weed, had a complicated childhood with a weird father and concocts a plan to put his town back on the map by owning a slave and segregating the local high school, which transgressions eventually land him a reckoning with the Supreme Court. You can’t make this stuff up, but Paul Beatty can, in a wildly satirical novel that challenges the Constitution, father-son relationships, the civil rights movement and other sacred cattle of American life. The narrator, nicknamed The Sellout later in the story, grows up the subject of racially-fraught psychological experiments staged by his sociologist father, believing it is all for a memoir that will make the struggling family solvent. But there is no memoir: just a father killed by the cops and a bill for a drive-through funeral. And the town’s most famous resident, the fictional Hominy Jenkins, who is the last of the nonfictional Little Rascals of movie fame, a man who wants to be, or play, The Sellout’s slave. If this sounds like exceptionally challenging satire, you’re on the right track.
Why you’ll like it:
The consensus among reviewers – and this book was reviewed by the best – is that The Sellout is outrageously, side-splitting funny, but also a vehicle for some pretty profound analysis of race relations in America. Beatty spares no one and nothing: for example, he calls Black History Month an “onslaught of disingenuous pride and niche marketing.”
He told the Paris Review that he questions the wisdom of advising someone to “be yourself”: “Most people are like, Be yourself, that’s enough—but in Slumberland there’s a line where the narrator decided he’s not going to tell anyone to “be themselves,” because most times when people are themselves they act like assholes. Why would I encourage that? It’s an idea I play with and try to reshape from book to book, about our individual responsibility and culpability. There’s something in the shift from White Boy Shuffle to Slumberland to The Sellout that shows a progression, but it’s the kind of progression that I completely believe in—things change but remain the same.”
But Beatty resists calling his book satire: “In my head it would limit what I could do, how I could write about something. I’m just writing. Some of it’s funny. I’m surprised that everybody keeps calling this a comic novel. I mean, I get it. But it’s an easy way not to talk about anything else. I would better understand it if they talked about it in a hyphenated way, to talk about it as a tragicomic novel, even. There’s comedy in the book, but there’s a bunch of other stuff in there, too. It’s easy just to hide behind the humor, and then you don’t have to talk about anything else. But I definitely don’t think of myself as a satirist. I mean, what is satire? Do you remember that New Yorker cover that everyone was saying was satire? Barack and Michelle fist-bumping? That’s not satire to me. It was just a commentary. Just poking fun at somebody doesn’t make something satire. It’s a word everyone throws around a lot. I’m not sure how I define it.”
What others are saying:
In The New York Times , Dwight Garner writes: “The first 100 pages of…The Sellout are the most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I’ve read in at least a decade. I gave up underlining the killer bits because my arm began to hurt. “Badass” is not the most precise critical term. What I mean is that the first third of The Sellout reads like the most concussive monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle wrapped in a satirical yet surprisingly delicate literary and historical sensibility. Mr. Beatty impastos every line, in ways that recall writers like Ishmael Reed, with shifting densities of racial and political meaning. The jokes come up through your spleen…Broad satirical vistas are not so hard for a novelist to sketch. What’s hard is the close-up work, the bolt-by-bolt driving home of your thoughts and your sensibility. This is where Mr. Beatty shines…in this landmark and deeply aware comic novel.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “. . . a droll, biting look at racism in modern America. At the novel’s opening, its narrator, a black farmer whose last name is Me, has been hauled before the Supreme Court for keeping a slave and reinstituting racial segregation in Dickens, an inner-city neighborhood in Los Angeles inexplicably zoned for agrarian use. When Dickens is erased from the map by gentrification, Me hatches a modest proposal to bring it back by segregating the local school. While his logic may be skewed, there is a perverse method in his madness; he is aided by Hominy, a former child star from The Little Rascals, who insists that Me take him as his slave. Beatty gleefully catalogues offensive racial stereotypes but also reaches further, questioning what exactly constitutes black identity in America. Wildly funny but deadly serious, Beatty’s caper is populated by outrageous caricatures, and its damning social critique carries the day.”
“Beatty, author of the deservedly highly praised The White Boy Shuffle (1996), here outdoes himself and possibly everybody else in a send-up of race, popular culture, and politics in today’s America . . . Beatty hits on all cylinders in a darkly funny, dead-on-target, elegantly written satire . . . [The Sellout] is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and, in the way of the great ones, profoundly thought provoking. A major contribution,” says Booklist’s starred review.’
A starred Kirkus Review says: “The provocative author is back with his most penetratingly satirical novel yet Beatty has never been afraid to stir the pot when it comes to racial and socioeconomic issues, and his latest is no different. In fact, this novel is his most incendiary, and readers unprepared for streams of racial slurs (and hilarious vignettes about nearly every black stereotype imaginable) in the service of satire should take a pass. The protagonist lives in Dickens, “a ghetto community” in Los Angeles, and works the land in an area called “The Farms,” where he grows vegetables, raises small livestock and smokes a ton of “good weed.” After being raised by a controversial sociologist father who subjected him to all manner of psychological and social experiments, the narrator is both intellectually gifted and extremely street-wise. When Dickens is removed from the map of California, he goes on a quest to have it reinstated with the help of Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal, who hangs around the neighborhood regaling everyone with tales of the ridiculously racist skits he used to perform with the rest of the gang. It’s clear that Hominy has more than a few screws loose, and he volunteers to serve as the narrator’s slave—yes, slave—on his journey. Another part of the narrator’s plan involves segregating the local school so that it allows only black, Latino and other nonwhite students. Eventually, he faces criminal charges and appears in front of the Supreme Court in what becomes “the latest in a long line of landmark race-related cases.” Readers turned off by excessive use of the N-word or those who are easily offended by stereotypes may find the book tough going, but fans of satire and blatantly honest—and often laugh-out-loud funny—discussions of race and class will be rewarded on each page. Beatty never backs down, and readers are the beneficiaries. Another daring, razor-sharp novel from a writer with talent to burn.”
NPR says: “The Sellout is a comic masterpiece, but it’s much more than just that — it’s one of the smartest and most honest reflections on race and identity in America in a very long time, written by an author who truly understands what it means to talk about the history of the country. “That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book — that we can turn the page and move … on,” the narrator muses. “But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.”
The Nation says: “Yet even as it shreds through the sentimental, The Sellout is more mature and affecting than Beatty’s previous novels. In its last pages, it becomes something more than the sum of its searing satirical indictments of contemporary mores, racial and otherwise. Ducking and weaving under the pummel of Don Rickles punch lines, one discovers, among other things, a loving portrait of a father and son, and their reconciliation of sorts; a love letter to the city of Los Angeles; indelible portraits of the Supreme Court justices; purple-hazed Pynchonesque set pieces, including something of an ode to the Pacific Coast Highway; notes toward a semi-serious theory of “unmitigated blackness,” matched with a profound criticism of same; and finally, a resounding refusal of all self-satisfied definitions and patented claims on the concept of race and proper racial belonging.”
When is it available?
It’s at the Albany and Mark Twain branches of the Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Negroland
By Margo Jefferson
(Knopf Doubleday, $25, 256 pages)
Who is this author?
In 1995, Margo Jefferson won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, after a long career as a theater and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. She has also written for Vogue, New York magazine and The New Republic and is the author of On Michael Jackson, a book-length essay. Jefferson, who grew up in Chicago, is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts and at The New School in New York City. Her bestselling memoir, Negroland, won critical and popular acclaim, including inclusion on best books and notable book lists for 2015 at The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire and Vanity Fair.
What is this book about?
Margo Jefferson has enjoyed a privileged life. Her father was a respected pediatrician; her mother a socialite, and Margo had the benefits of a fine education and an upper-crust social life complete with exclusive clubs, sororities and fraternities and men and women pursuing professional careers. Nothing unusual about that, except that it occurred in what Jefferson calls “Negroland” — “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” As they say, from those to whom much is given, much is expected, and in this memoir Jefferson takes a deep and personal look back at her elite upbringing and the small aristocratic world in which it took place, as well as how that world was affected by the civil rights movement, feminism and hopeful but naïve ideas about the emergence of a “postracial” society.” She also explores the tensions and pressures of living a privileged life in a segment of the larger society that fails to respect or value it.
Why you’ll like it:
“I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter, and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor,” she writes. The book is frank about how excelling within the black bourgeoisie, which Jefferson calls “The Third Race,” did not guarantee protection from the prejudice and malevolence of many in the outside world, and she does not flinch from describing the often cruel internal Third Race hierarchies of status based on skin tone, ability to “pass,” wealth and social status. Jefferson told an interviewer for Gawker:
“For a child, for the black bourgeois, the scope—and I think this is true for any group that has been discriminated against, oppressed, and whose status is always contested—varies. Within an all-black world, it felt very, very secure. How is this manifested? By material things—your house, clothes, by manners, by the schools you go to, by what your parents say to you about how you’re supposed to carry yourself in the world. It always shifts when you move into various parts of the white world. Then you are contending with much shakier status. You start learning that your privilege can be challenged or disregarded at any minute. You’re learning those things almost simultaneously. . . . We all live several lives—there’s the internal, there’s the external, there’s the life of me as a black woman, there’s the life of me as an American citizen—and we’re all doing this, and how are you faithful to those lives?”
What others are saying:
“Poignant. . . . In Negroland, Jefferson is simultaneously looking in and looking out at her blackness, elusive in her terse, evocative reconnaissance, leaving us yearning to know more,” says The Los Angeles Times.
The New York Times says: “. . . [a] powerful and complicated memoir…power dwells in the restraint of Negroland. Ms. Jefferson gets a lot said about her life, the insults she has weathered, her insecurities, even her suicidal impulses. There’s sinew and grace in the way she plays with memory, dodging here and burning there, like a photographer in a darkroom…This book runs on several rails at once. In part it’s a history of the upper strata of black society in America…In part it’s also [Jefferson's] own story, and a primer on being what she calls a “Good Negro Girl” in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s…With luck, there will be a sequel to this book, one that takes us more fully up to the present and continues to reckon with the questions that animate her…”
In The New York Times Book Review, author Tracy K. Smith writes: “Jefferson’s candor, and the courage and rigor of her critic’s mind, recall a number of America’s greatest thinkers on race, many of whom she directly references, refines and grapples with: James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier. Jefferson also invites women to the round table: Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid—and voices outside that established canon…How can a book so slim take on such mammoth considerations and manage them with such efficacy? Perhaps because we gain entry via one girl and, later, the woman she becomes. Perhaps because no matter how conscious Jefferson makes us of societal circumstances, what drives Negroland is an abiding commitment to the primacy of the individual. There are drawbacks to this approach…But what we gain from such a choice is revelatory: recognition of the nuance, fragmentation and fragility of a single black life begging to be considered on its own terms and in its own voice. Aren’t all of us, no matter who we are, living for the rare moments when we can forget about the collective we belong to and just be?”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Jefferson, a former book and theater critic for the New York Times and Newsweek, writes about growing up in mid-20th-century Chicago as well as in “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty” in this eloquent and enlightening memoir. Jefferson describes how her peers thought of themselves as “the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians.” Jefferson’s father was a pediatrician at Provident, the nation’s oldest black hospital, and her mother was a social worker turned socialite. With her family’s privilege came many perks: attendance at the private, progressive, mostly white University of Chicago Laboratory School; summer camps; drama performances; an impeccable wardrobe; and membership in national black civic organizations such as Jack and Jill of America and the Co-Ettes Club. Yet much was expected; for Jefferson’s generation, she says, the motto was “Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.” In the late 1970s, though established in a successful journalism career, Jefferson contemplated suicide to escape the continued weight of these expectations. . . . Perceptive, specific, and powerful, Jefferson’s work balances themes of race, class, entitlement, and privilege with her own social and cultural awakening.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “From a Pulitzer Prize-winning theater and book critic, a memoir about being raised in upper-class black Chicago, where families worked tirelessly to distance themselves as much from lower-class black people as from white people. Born in 1947, Jefferson has lived through an era that has seen radical shifts in the way black people are viewed and treated in the United States. The civil rights movement, shifting viewpoints on affirmative action, and the election of the first black president, with all the promise and peril it held . . . The author describes a segment of the population intent on simultaneously distinguishing itself from both white people and lower-class black people and drawing from both groups to forge its own identity. She writes about being raised in a mindset that demanded the best from her and her family, while she also experienced resentment regarding the relative lack of recognition for the achievements they had earned. . . . Jefferson swings the narrative back and forth through her life, exploring the tides of racism, opportunity, and dignity while also provocatively exploring the inherent contradictions for Jefferson and her family members in working so tirelessly to differentiate themselves.”
When is it available?
This provocative memoir can be borrowed from the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain branch.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
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