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Priscilla Kipp

NonfictionHistory

A brutal struggle for America’s Southwest

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In this turbulent election year, as issues like human rights for minorities intensify, The Apache Wars relates the attempted annihilation of a culture more than a century ago, supported by government policy and encouraged by popular prejudice. It is compelling—and a timely if distressing read. University of New Mexico Professor Paul Andrew Hutton’s meticulously researched and exhaustively chronicled history of the longest war in U.S. history (1861-1886) reintroduces the many legendary heroes and villains of the early days in America’s Southwest. It is also a thorough accounting of the cost—in lives and destinies—paid by Native Americans, the settlers who claimed their tribal lands and the postwar military forces left looking for another fight.

Leading the way through these tales of barbarism and perfidy in Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas is Felix Ward, a one-eyed 12-year-old boy of mixed Irish/Mexican heritage, whose kidnapping by the White Mountain Apaches in a raid on his family’s ranch ignited the many simmering conflicts between settlers and natives. Adopted by the tribe and taught their traditional ways, the youth became Mickey Free, riding astride two cultures as an expert Apache scout for the U.S. Army and the adopted son of his Apache captors. Revered for his hunting and tracking skills and reviled as a “miserable little coyote,” Mickey Free figured in almost all encounters between these enemies, who “could never decide if he was friend or foe.”

Hutton brings to life many characters, among them Geronimo, the last Apache chief to surrender and doomed to become a tourist attraction; Civil War generals like Philip Sheridan, who reportedly said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian;” the ever-elusive Apache Kid; warriors Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, Lozen, and Victorio; and Army scouts Kit Carson and Al Sieber. All played their parts in the “bleak and unforgiving world” known as Apachéria, and all figured in the Indians’ ultimate removal from their tribal lands.

 

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

In this turbulent election year, as issues like human rights for minorities intensify, The Apache Wars relates the attempted annihilation of a culture more than a century ago, supported by government policy and encouraged by popular prejudice. It is compelling—and a timely if distressing read.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The hidden horror of early America

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Christopher Columbus, honored as the discoverer of America and celebrated annually with a national holiday, was a slaver. This and other grim facts about the trail of human trafficking throughout history are likely not learned in school. In The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, Andrés Reséndez, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, offers a compelling account of a huge, tragic, missing piece of history.

From the Caribbean to South America to Mexico, then north to the West and Southwest of America, colonization, conquest and greed spawned the need for cheap labor and servitude. Long before the African slave trade brought captives to America, European explorers and conquerors claimed native men, women and children for profit-making purposes. Slavery was “first and foremost a business involving investors, soldiers, agents, and powerful officials.” In what is now Peru and Bolivia, for example, a “state-directed” labor force for silver mines “began in 1573 and remained in operation for 250 years.” Enslaved workers were brutally treated and subjected to diseases like smallpox, for which they had neither immunity nor remedy.

Spain’s monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, figure prominently in an equally long history of reformers, predecessors to the abolitionists. They shared a conviction that any form of slavery was morally wrong—but faced difficulty in converting those who profited from it. Owners of Indian slaves, distantly removed from their royal rulers or, as in America, from political deciders back east, could ignore demands for reform. When the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted in 1865, legally abolishing slavery throughout the U.S., Southern laws like the Black Codes continued to thwart freedom for African slaves. In the Southwest and West, where Indian tribes went on enslaving each other, warring over horses, guns and territory, laws made in Washington meant little.

Today, with the complex and myriad effects of globalization frequently in the news, human trafficking has managed to endure. The Other Slavery both reminds and cautions: Man’s inhumanity to man is still making history.

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

Christopher Columbus, honored as the discoverer of America and celebrated annually with a national holiday, was a slaver. This and other grim facts about the trail of human trafficking throughout history are likely not learned in school. In The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, Andrés Reséndez, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, offers a compelling account of a huge, tragic, missing piece of history.
NonfictionFamily & Relationships

The euphoria of being a grandparent

Review by Priscilla Kipp

How does an award-winning journalist contemplate a transformative change in her own life? With prodigious research that finds room for the blind love growing in “a whole new chamber in my heart.” Lesley Stahl, longtime correspondent for “60 Minutes,” has a lot to share about Becoming Grandma.

Bowled over by her “thunderstruck” reaction to the birth of her first granddaughter, Stahl decides to examine grandparenthood in all its scientific, psychological, familial and cultural dimensions. She begins by looking for an explanation for her unexpected euphoria and discovers there’s a scientific reason for it: Oxytocin, the hormone that the female brain releases upon childbirth, works for grandmas, too. Stahl compares the experience to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, altering women from within and changing “what even the most career-oriented woman thinks is important.”

Stahl surveys the mothers, stepgrandmas and surrogate “grans” of today’s fluid families, including great-grandmother Whoopi Goldberg, columnist Ellen Goodman and Stahl’s “60 Minutes” colleagues. 

Stahl calls the rewards of grandparenting the “extra bonus points” that come with aging. Now well into her 70s, she is still working—and her two beloved granddaughters are keeping her young.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How does an award-winning journalist contemplate a transformative change in her own life? With prodigious research that finds room for the blind love growing in “a whole new chamber in my heart.” Lesley Stahl, longtime correspondent for “60 Minutes,” has a lot to share about Becoming Grandma.
NonfictionMemoir

A comic’s rocky, yet rewarding journey

Review by Priscilla Kipp

American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox once wrote, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone”—wisdom contradicted by the gifted standup comedian, actress and writer Bonnie McFarlane in her often hilarious and sometimes poignant memoir, You’re Better Than Me. Saved, or cursed, by her instinct to find something funny in almost every situation, she advises her reader early on, “If you have the appropriate emotional response to things, congratulations, you’re better than me.”

Calling herself a “weirdo, but not a serial killer”—although her description of killing chickens on her family farm in Alberta, Canada might suggest otherwise—McFarlane recounts the trials (raped at 17) and tribulations (no television, no friends) of rural isolation and adolescent angst.

Moving to Vancouver, McFarlane works as a waitress and freelance writer, where she discovers comedy clubs and joke writing. Eventually she realizes that her jokes will only be told if she performs them herself. She gets lucky, lands a manager and continues her roller coaster career via stints in Toronto, New York and Hollywood. She struggles with relationships, sexist stereotyping, depression, income and insecurity. She auditions constantly, writes for and stars in television shows that quickly die, and wins a role on the reality show “Last Comic Standing,” where she becomes infamous for uttering an obscenity. She scores a spot on David Letterman’s late-night show, “kills” it (a good thing), then clumsily drops the microphone, greatly annoying her host. She gets fired, heckled, rejected by her comedy heroes (Janeane Garofalo is one), and occasionally derailed by her own poor judgment (like excessive drinking and bad timing).

Now married, a mother and podcaster (“My Wife Hates Me”) with husband-comedian Rich Voss, McFarlane continues to provoke her live audience. She needs their laughs, because, she confides, “the audience is the instrument the comedian is learning to play.” Her readers can now join in the experience. Cue the applause.

American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox once wrote, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone”—wisdom contradicted by the gifted standup comedian, actress and writer Bonnie McFarlane in her often hilarious and sometimes poignant memoir, You’re Better Than Me.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Hunting down answers in a brother’s murder

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Award-winning journalist and Princeton University professor David Kushner was 4 years old when he asked his 11-year-old brother to bring home his favorite candy from the convenience store, just a short bike ride away through the woods. He could not have imagined that he would never see Jon again. Neither could his family, or anyone else in 1973 Tampa, Florida, where children were free to explore the outside world and parents fearlessly encouraged it. Jon’s brutal murder killed such innocence. Kushner’s riveting memoir, Alligator Candy, begins by asking how any parent or family can survive such unimaginable evil and devastating grief. 

Growing up in the shadow of Jon’s death, Kushner heard the rumors and imagined all kinds of things, but he resisted learning the factual details of the crime, afraid of asking questions that could resurrect his parents’ grief. When, years later, one of the killers received a parole hearing, Kushner and his oldest brother attended. They learned how horrifically Jon died, how the killers were caught—and what became of the candy Jon never brought home that day.

Kushner interviews those who searched for Jon and hunted down his killers. He taps the memories of those who mourned with and supported his family. His parents at last share their boundless sorrow, and how they survived. “Time goes by,” writes his mother, “and grief finds a niche . . . and goes along, too, included in everything. ‘I’m here,’ says Grief. ‘Never mind me, just go about your business.’ ” Finally, he knows as much as he can about the brother he was barely old enough to remember. 

Now a parent himself, Kushner must balance his fear of random evil against the statistical rarity of child murder. The struggle becomes terrifyingly real when his 3-year-old daughter disappears at a carnival. Yet he goes on to share the joy of her first solo bike ride. Parents today can understand the love, hope and fear he so eloquently describes in this account of one family’s transcendent courage in the face of crushing pain.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Award-winning journalist and Princeton University professor David Kushner was 4 years old when he asked his 11-year-old brother to bring home his favorite candy from the convenience store, just a short bike ride away through the woods. He could not have imagined that he would never see Jon again. Neither could his family, or anyone else in 1973 Tampa, Florida, where children were free to explore the outside world and parents fearlessly encouraged it. Jon’s brutal murder killed such innocence. Kushner’s riveting memoir, Alligator Candy, begins by asking how any parent or family can survive such unimaginable evil and devastating grief.
NonfictionPolitics

Tough love for a pivotal president

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In a recent Salon interview, Georgetown University professor and political analyst Michael Eric Dyson asked, “[H]ow do you carry out a criticism of those with whom you disagree without losing your humanity or questioning theirs in the process?” He answers his own question in The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America. Driven by the hopes Obama raised with his historical rise to power, Dyson delivers a provocative scrutiny of a presidency as complex as the ongoing issues of race, and he does so with grace and wary empathy.

Some of Obama’s fellow African Americans, like civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and academic-activist Cornel West, can be brutally critical, while others, like Al Sharpton and Andrew Young, have been candid but kinder. Nationwide, blacks who voted in record numbers to help elect Obama have mostly given him a pass, according to Dyson, hesitant to speak too harshly because he is one of their own.

Dyson, though also black, is none of these. His review of Obama’s presidency is as unsparing as a parent practicing tough love. The love is there, but it grows tired. Why, he asks, does Obama so often point out the failings of his fellow African Americans while minimizing the context of racial inequality in America? Why can’t the president be as forthcoming as his wife Michelle in acknowledging the trials of being the first black family to occupy the White House? Why does he speak out about racial injustices less forcefully than his former attorney general, Eric Holder? Dyson carries his lengthy list of disappointments and complaints into the Oval Office and a revealing interview with the president himself.

Then come Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddy Gray and Charleston. The black president who had seemed so reluctant to address his own blackness is finally moved to speak from his spirit, in a eulogy that seems to deliver, Dyson says, on “the promise of his black presidency” at last. Time will tell whether Obama can include racial progress in his legacy. Dyson is cautiously holding onto that hope.

 

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

In a recent Salon interview, Georgetown University professor and political analyst Michael Eric Dyson asked, “[H]ow do you carry out a criticism of those with whom you disagree without losing your humanity or questioning theirs in the process?” He answers his own question in The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America. Driven by the hopes Obama raised with his historical rise to power, Dyson delivers a provocative scrutiny of a presidency as complex as the ongoing issues of race, and he does so with grace and wary empathy.
NonfictionMemoir

A wise and witty look at a century of life

Review by Priscilla Kipp

From his rare centenarian perch, Pulitzer Prize winner and World War II epic novelist Herman Wouk surveys the ups and downs of his long literary life—and the deep faith that has accompanied him throughout—in his delightfully sanguine memoir, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.

The book’s title holds the two threads of his work, Wouk notes. “Sailor” refers to the scope of his writing life and the experiences that inspired him, and “Fiddler,” as in Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye, underscores the proudly Jewish author’s own “spiritual journey.” Wouk’s ability to weave these two strands together creates a unique framework to consider a life lived long and well.

Wouk's experiences as a naval officer in World War II inspired his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny.

Wouk might as well be inviting the reader to pull up a chair by the fire and have a listen over tea, so companionably chatty is the once-reticent writer. He is a man at peace with his age and his work. The latter, he seems reluctantly ready to admit, may finally be complete—although maybe not. In a 2012 New York Times interview, asked if he planned to stop writing any time soon, he answered, “What am I going to do? Sit around and wait a year?” And here he is once more, content “for the chance to please you through my books.”

The boy from the Bronx grew up loving a hard-working Russian-Jewish immigrant father who enjoyed “convulsing us kids with his drolleries in Yiddish.” The young Wouk also feasted on Twain’s humor, learned from Dumas’ action-packed narratives and took lessons about a writer’s fame from Melville, whose work came to life only 30 years after his death. Wouk then aspired to be “a funny writer, nothing else.” He succeeded, graduating from Columbia College and working as a gag writer for Fred Allen’s popular radio show, among others. Then came Pearl Harbor.

For Wouk, life didn’t get in the way of his writing: It became his writing. Experiences as a naval officer on the destroyer warship USS Zane, with its “crazy captain,” would become The Caine Mutiny (1951), earning him the Pulitzer Prize. Marjorie Morningstar, which landed him on the cover of Time, borrowed his mother’s family name, Morgenstern, Yiddish for Morningstar. Youngblood Hawke, he notes, is the what-if part of his life had he not met and married Betty Sarah, the love of his life as well as his literary agent. What he learned from military figures, historians and fellow veterans would inform The Winds of War (1971). His “main task . . . to bring the Holocaust to life in a frame of global war,” inspired War and Remembrance. Both novels earned Wouk a global audience; mixed, sometimes scathing, reviews; and popular success as the books became landmark television mini-series.

Now the novelist reveals the real-life sources for his fictitious characters, recounting their stories and contributions. He recalls the years spent doing prodigious amounts of research while trying to hold onto his confidence and get the words right (The Winds of War took seven years to finish; War and Remembrance, another seven). His fame has continued to fluctuate, but he still chooses his words carefully, mostly avoiding spite, melancholy or regret.

While The Atlantic recently praised him as “The Great War Novelist America Forgot,” here Wouk has what may well be the final word: “Other things in the literary life may have ceased to matter that much, but I have always loved the work.”

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

From his rare centenarian perch, Pulitzer Prize winner and World War II epic novelist Herman Wouk surveys the ups and downs of his long literary life—and the deep faith that has accompanied him throughout—in his delightfully sanguine memoir, Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author.

NonfictionMedicine

Inside the ambulance

Review by Priscilla Kipp

With an unsparing eye for all the details, Kevin Hazzard takes readers on a chaotic ride through a city’s crack houses and road carnage, a hospital’s turbulent mental health ward and still-smoldering scenes of domestic violence. In A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back, a gripping account of his 10 years “running” ambulance calls in Atlanta, Hazzard evolves from neophyte (terrified he might harm instead of help) to true believer (total professional) to burned-out paramedic wise enough to know it was time to quit.

There’s the patient who dies because medics allow him to walk to the ambulance instead of insisting he go on a stretcher. There’s the victim who loves his wife even though he ends up nailed to a wall (literally), and the baby born at a mere 23 weeks of gestation, whose beating heart is visible through his translucent skin. There’s this: Narcan really can raise the dead. And this: Firemen and medics can get in each other’s way.

Yet Hazzard is no gleeful voyeur; the respect he accords his patients and many—though not all—of his colleagues imparts a kind of honorable dignity to this work. “Lives are in the balance,” he says, “and it’s just us.” He admits his addiction to the adrenaline rush from an incoming call, senses when his empathy begins to feel more like apathy, and chooses to leave before he becomes what he calls a Killer, a medic indifferent to the fate of his patients.

Hazzard has been, in other words, just the kind of human being you hope would come to your rescue. His story may well inspire others to take a chance on this vital but often overlooked vocation.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With an unsparing eye for all the details, Kevin Hazzard takes readers on a chaotic ride through a city’s crack houses and road carnage, a hospital’s turbulent mental health ward and still-smoldering scenes of domestic violence.
NonfictionMemoir

The fearful legacy of a father’s abuse

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In this captivating companion to the sensational book and 1991 movie Not Without My Daughter, it is the daughter’s turn to tell her tale. Now grown, educated and fiercely independent, Mahtob Mahmoody recounts her harrowing escape with her mother from a tyrannical and abusive father in war-torn Iran. The years that follow, back in the U.S.A., are fraught with fear that the father will follow and reclaim his daughter. Instead of seeking anonymity, Mahtob’s mother, Betty Mahmoody, chooses to publicize their plight and the failure of U.S. and international laws to protect victims of international kidnappings. Loopholes get tightened and laws change as Betty becomes a passionate advocate for such injustices. Mahtob has no choice but to share the burden of her mother’s work: frequent travel, journalists asking probing questions and the constant threat of her father’s intervention.

Even changing her name temporarily to Amanda and reasserting her faith as a Christian do not alter the fact that Mahtob is her Muslim father’s daughter, and he wants her back. He stalks her dreams and threatens her security, engaging strangers to call and email her relentlessly, and even invade her apartment. Mahtob suffers from the debilitating effects of lupus and struggles with intimate relationships. She is unable to move on with her life until a psychology course assignment to “collect happiness” by keeping a daily list of five things that make her happy and sharing it with her classmates, seemingly impossible tasks, forces her to see things differently. Mahtob discovers she can change her life by changing her attitude. Before long, her disease is in remission and she is able to rid herself of many medications and their side effects. 

In My Name Is Mahtob, forgiveness comes in stages and takes many forms. It is a journey she bravely shares, as she discovers a “pleasure that there is not in vengeance.”

In this captivating companion to the sensational book and 1991 movie Not Without My Daughter, it is the daughter’s turn to tell her tale. Now grown, educated and fiercely independent, Mahtob Mahmoody recounts her harrowing escape with her mother from a tyrannical and abusive father in war-torn Iran.
NonfictionMemoir

Lessons gleaned from a peripatetic life

Review by Priscilla Kipp

My Life on the Road is a traveler’s journey like no other, and Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient (President Obama called her a “champion notice-er”), journalist, organizer and activist, is your unique guide.

As a child from Toledo, Ohio, Steinem accompanied her father across the country whenever the spirit—and the need to earn money—moved him. Her mother, suffering from depression and unable to continue her own career, taught Steinem the painful price a woman could pay for staying put and isolated. Leading us on her road trips as a child and later as an activist and organizer, Steinem attaches faces and stories to the many reasons she loves and learns from it all. At 81, she is still at it.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Smith College, Steinem began her global education with a two-year fellowship in India. Here she learned the value of community. Traveling on trains with women who had little but shared everything, Steinem became part of their “talking circles,” where “listeners can speak, speakers can listen, facts can be debated, and empathy can create trust and understanding.” In this age of Twitter, email and texting, she cautions us not to forget the irreplaceable value of face-to-face dialogue in a shared space.

What makes Steinem such a credible activist and organizer for human rights is her ability to listen to and learn from others. For example, she learns from Native Americans that Ben Franklin used the Iroquois Confederacy as a model for the U.S. Constitution (except the Founding Fathers left out women). She asks, what else didn’t we learn in school?

If at the end of this inspiring trip, you aren’t inclined to share her wanderlust, you may at least see your own world—and opportunities for improving it—differently. As Steinem says, “We have to behave as if everything we do matters—because sometimes it does.”

My Life on the Road is a traveler’s journey like no other, and Gloria Steinem, feminist icon, 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient (President Obama called her a “champion notice-er”), journalist, organizer and activist, is your unique guide.

NonfictionMemoir

From couch potato to ultra-marathons

Review by Priscilla Kipp

At 51, his days full of work and travel as an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for CNN, Tom Foreman relaxes in what free time he has. He ignores the added pounds and growing lethargy until the day his 18-year-old daughter asks, “Will you run a marathon with me?” Foreman is too loving a dad to say no, and way too far past his days as a competitive runner to rise easily to her challenge.

In Foreman’s witty and endearing chronicle, My Year of Running Dangerously, we follow his transformation from self-described couch potato to marathoner, then ultra-marathoner. You don’t have to be a runner to understand—and feel—the blood, sweat and tears Foreman pours into his training and his first marathon with his daughter, the one he ran for her and—she later admits—she ran for him, to get him off that couch.

About halfway through this well-paced read, you may be asking, as does Foreman himself, why endure such punishment? The marathons and half-marathons keep coming, and then there is the 50-plus mile ultra-marathon he cannot resist giving a try. His brother survives a heart attack. His mother worries he’s next. His wife and daughters adjust, and readjust, to accommodate his all-consuming obsession. Foreman admits he cannot even manage one night out with his frustrated wife without bringing up his next run. Yet, lucky for him, those closest to Foreman rise to go the distance in offering their support. Together they learn that the goal is to go on challenging yourself, period. Balance comes with the eventual realization that, consequently, life is fuller and each moment richer. 

Anyone who runs, has been inspired by their own child or has tried to accomplish something difficult will find plenty worth pondering in the story of Foreman and his family. Life, he concludes, “is worth more than just living.” You just need to go for it.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

At 51, his days full of work and travel as an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for CNN, Tom Foreman relaxes in what free time he has. He ignores the added pounds and growing lethargy until the day his 18-year-old daughter asks, “Will you run a marathon with me?” Foreman is too loving a dad to say no, and way too far past his days as a competitive runner to rise easily to her challenge.
NonfictionTravelHistory

A journey through an ancient lineage

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Descendants of the biblical farmer Cain can see the world through the shepherd’s eyes of his brother Abel in this memorable journey with today’s Abels, the Fulani nomads of Mali. Modern times encroach upon the ancient paths of their seasonal pilgrimages: New generations trade their Zebu cows and goats for the settled life, cellphones and urban good times. Overhead, warplanes commandeer the skies, working the ever-changing frontlines of terrorism in West Africa. Borders and rules—and risks—adjust with regimes. Climate change distorts the seasons, pummeling these travelers with untimely droughts and ravaging storms.

Yet the estimated 20 million Fulani, the largest nomadic group in the world today, continue their migrations. Following one family’s transhumance through dry and rainy seasons, across desert, river and the timeless, arid lands of the sahel, Anna Badhken shows their resistance to all modern measures of time and context. Living only in the thatched huts they carry with them, sleeping under the sky, they move on. And on.

They carry family ties and a sense of home with them wherever they are, moving forward to the next good thing: food and drink for their cattle, and hence for themselves. They live in the here and now in ways the modern world has lost even the memory of, and their story, told with deftly measured, evocative prose and poetically precise detail, slows the reader down to consider just what that means.

Allowed to embed herself with one Fulani family, the experienced war correspondent Badkhen infuses her story with the kind of authenticity only a fellow traveler can know. A lifelong wanderer herself, she says, “The truest way to tell such stories, I find, is to live inside of them. To write about the nomads, I walked alongside.” And so, thanks to her, do we.

 

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

Descendants of the biblical farmer Cain can see the world through the shepherd’s eyes of his brother Abel in this memorable journey with today’s Abels, the Fulani nomads of Mali. Modern times encroach upon the ancient paths of their seasonal pilgrimages: New generations trade their Zebu cows and goats for the settled life, cellphones and urban good times. Overhead, warplanes commandeer the skies, working the ever-changing frontlines of terrorism in West Africa. Borders and rules—and risks—adjust with regimes. Climate change distorts the seasons, pummeling these travelers with untimely droughts and ravaging storms.
NonfictionMemoir

Guidance for bearing the burdens of history

Review by Priscilla Kipp

When his 15-year old son, Samori, was devastated by the news that Ferguson, Missouri police had been exonerated in the death of Michael Brown, Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic and an eloquent, powerful voice on the subject of race relations, felt compelled to address his son’s despair. The resulting book was originally scheduled for publication in September, but was rushed into print by publisher Spiegel & Grau in response to a surge in interest that followed the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina.

An angry, proud, despairing, vigilant, fearful and fiercely loving father, Coates watches his son confront what he calls the barriers, distances and breaches that stand Between the World and Me (the phrase comes from a poem by Richard Wright). Offering wisdom as well as comfort, he guides Samori through these challenges as they concern the African diaspora, the range and significance of which Coates first glimpsed as a student at Howard University. Growing up in Baltimore, he had to learn the culture and ways of the gang-oriented street in order to survive. He was an indifferent student saved from a predictable fate by the discipline and expectations of his own father. He tells his son how he arrived in Washington, D.C., dazzled by the global span of black scholars, poets, music-makers and activists he finds there. He discovers a new kind of power in learning from them his true heritage and legacy, far removed from the white version of the American Dream.

Initially dismissive of the nonviolent protestors of the civil rights movement, Coates is inspired by the more pragmatic Malcolm X. With an honesty that is intimate and endearing, he recounts for Samori the moment when he fully realizes his country’s unacknowledged, deeply troubling history: In 2001, Prince Jones, an innocent African-American friend, is killed by a Maryland policeman. The officer is exonerated.

Coates understands that he cannot protect his son. Children born into African-American families, he says, come already endangered: Parents beat their children first so that police will not beat or kill them later. It is not enough to want or expect police to change. He believes reform cannot happen unless we as a nation change, recognizing that they are us.

In a June 2014 article for The Atlantic (“The Case for Reparations”), Coates catalogued a history of institutionalized wrongs inflicted upon African Americans, ranging from government policies to fraudulent business practices. Now Coates likens such racism to a disembodiment, and he calls on Samori—named for an African king who died resisting foreign rule—to reclaim his identity, his body.

Ultimately, Coates’ powerful message, driven by a parent’s love, remains painfully hopeful. The struggle for change has meaning, and questions matter, perhaps even more than the answers.

 

When his 15-year old son, Samori, was devastated by the news that Ferguson, Missouri police had been exonerated in the death of Michael Brown, Ta-Nehisi Coates, senior editor at The Atlantic and an eloquent, powerful voice on the subject of race relations, felt compelled to address his son’s despair.

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