Priscilla Kipp

NonfictionBiography

An opera star’s rise against the odds

Review by Priscilla Kipp

You don’t have to be an opera fan to enjoy Sing for Your Life, but if you are, prepare for a feast. Daniel Bergner seats you in the front row of the Metropolitan Opera, and his larger-than life subject, African-American singer Ryan Speedo Green, keeps you there. A study in discipline and artistry, musical agility, opera itself and the role that race has played in all of it, this would be an enlightening read even without Green. His story makes it unforgettable.

Bergner tracks Green’s rise from an impoverished, shattered family to a career as a globally acclaimed bass-baritone, alternating past and present dramas with scenes of the daunting work going on backstage at one of the world’s iconic opera houses. Green’s mother is a constant, mostly malevolent force. His father leaves, his brother goes to prison and 12-year-old Green falls apart at a juvenile detention facility.

How Green grows from there is as captivating as any opera. There’s the teacher who saves his sanity and the facility staffer who gives him a radio; the football coach who makes his players take a music class; the principal who gives Green a chance at his school for the arts, even if he can’t sing; and YouTube, where Green mimics opera stars singing in Italian and German, though he doesn’t understand a word.

Always backlit by racial prejudice—its hazy history in opera and the shadow it continues to cast—the story has moments that bristle, as when Green is expected to sing “Ol’ Man River” at a party hosted by Met benefactors. He feels “reduced, confined, simplified, compressed, concealed” by the expectation the he will “sing woefully about the oppression of black people while taking care not to make white people uncomfortable.” Yet finally, recalling Paul Robeson, who “insisted on adding dignity” by changing some of the words, he sings “with almost enough beauty to crack the wall in front of him and make it disintegrate.” You can almost hear it happen.

 

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

You don’t have to be an opera fan to enjoy Sing for Your Life, but if you are, prepare for a feast. Daniel Bergner seats you in the front row of the Metropolitan Opera, and his larger-than life subject, African-American singer Ryan Speedo Green, keeps you there. A study in discipline and artistry, musical agility, opera itself and the role that race has played in all of it, this would be an enlightening read even without Green. His story makes it unforgettable.
NonfictionBiography

Young Winston at war

Review by Priscilla Kipp

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, October 2016

Winston Churchill looms large over the last century, a vivid player—for better or worse—in conflicts and crises almost everywhere in the British Empire. Controversial and complex, he became, as prime minister of the United Kingdom during World War II’s darkest days, beloved. In Hero of the Empire, bestselling author Candice Millard (The River of Doubt, Destiny of the Republic) offers a revealing portrait of the much younger man, smarting from his first political defeat and hungry for the fame he had yet to achieve. She explores the roots of Churchill’s grit and obstinacy, and the sheer luck that frequently saved his life. 

Churchill’s contemporaries also come vividly to life in Millard’s narrative: his American mother, Jennie, and her lovers; his father, Lord Randolph, disgraced by mental decline; fellow correspondents and fearless co-conspirators; and his first love, the opportunistic Pamela. The whiskey and cigars are here, too, right alongside rats that eat his pillow, constant hunger and many close brushes with death. While it is now hard to imagine world history without Churchill, Millard’s absorbing tale of his role in the Boer War manages to be a cliffhanger—his story came very close to ending when it had barely begun.

Seeking fame in the form of a medal, Churchill was an entitled aristocrat in search of any war that could provide one. When being a soldier for the far-flung British Empire at the close of the 19th century wasn’t producing results, he became a war correspondent in South Africa for London’s Morning Post—and then heroically saved soldiers’ lives when their train was attacked by fierce Boer forces. Taken prisoner, he would eventually escape, leaving behind the two men who planned to go with him and a thank-you note for the sympathetic warden. News of Churchill’s heroics and harrowing escape inspired jubilation back home and vaulted him into his first seat in Parliament. The rest, as they say, is history. 

 

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

In Hero of the Empire, bestselling author Candice Millard (The River of Doubt, Destiny of the Republic) offers a revealing portrait of a young Winston Churchill, smarting from his first political defeat and hungry for the fame he had yet to achieve.
NonfictionMemoir

Beyond treading water

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Swimming in the Sink is a comeback tale told straight from the heart—the big, intrepid heart belonging to Lynne Cox. In refreshingly candid style, the legendary open-water swimmer details her many achievements and sets the stage for her greatest challenge. From setting a world record crossing the English Channel (at the age of 15) to swimming in Arctic waters without a wetsuit, she swims with a purpose, whether promoting peace between Argentina and Chile or calling attention to environmental concerns. In 1987, her swim across the frigid Bering Strait helped to ease Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. 

As an elite athlete with a unique ability to acclimatize to cold, Cox also participated in scientific research studying the body’s response to extreme cold, helping to refine surgical and emergency treatment for cold-related traumas. When it came to recovering from the deaths of her beloved elderly parents, however, Cox found herself suddenly helpless, gravely ill and frightened by her damaged heart. Its fitting diagnosis: broken heart syndrome. Medications for atrial fibrillation, along with exercise and dietary restrictions, reshaped everything she knew about her body. Her swimming life seemingly over, Cox despaired: “I did not know what I was. I didn’t like the way I was. I didn’t like what was happening to me.”

With the help of good friends and caring physicians, she uses the mind-body connection to lower her heartbeat and restore proper breathing. She tries to swim again—beginning, improbably, in her kitchen sink. Mindfulness and positive thinking, added to her athletic grit, help Cox learn what it takes to swim—and love—all over again.

 

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

Swimming in the Sink is a comeback tale told straight from the heart—the big, intrepid heart belonging to Lynne Cox. In refreshingly candid style, the legendary open-water swimmer details her many achievements and sets the stage for her greatest challenge. From setting a world record crossing the English Channel (at the age of 15) to swimming in Arctic waters without a wetsuit, she swims with a purpose, whether promoting peace between Argentina and Chile or calling attention to environmental concerns. In 1987, her swim across the frigid Bering Strait helped to ease Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States.
NonfictionMusicBody, Mind & Spirit

Discovering the healing power of music

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Following successful surgery that, unexpectedly, sends his body into shock, Andrew Schulman lies in a coma in Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital’s Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU). Nothing is helping; death is near. Desperate, his wife Wendy reaches into her bag for her cell phone and instead finds the one thing she hopes might save him: his iPod. Gently placing one earbud in his ear and the other in her own, she plays his favorite, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Terrified it won’t help, or even make things worse, she waits. Waking the Spirit: A Musician's Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul is the patient’s own astounding account of what happens next.

Andrew Schulman is a classical guitarist who has played New York’s many venues for years, from restaurants and cabarets to concert halls. In each, he learned to know his audience, and—often from memory—play the music that reaches and touches them. Now, working to recover playing skills and memory damaged by his near-death ordeal, he wants to give something back to those responsible for saving his life. Remembering what the nurses call his own “St. Matthew Miracle,” Schulman returns to the SICU with his guitar and, three times a week for 90 minutes, plays for patients and staff. Amid the constant cacophony of life-support machines, he counters with the likes of Bach, the Beatles, Gershwin and Queen.

While his experiences, and the reactions they inspire, constitute much of the book, there is a lot to learn along the way as well. Music—how it affects the brain, its historical use as therapy and its future promising role in more humane and palliative care—is the true subject here, told by a “medical musician” (a term first used by Pythagoras) who learns firsthand that music can indeed help to heal both player and listener.

 

Priscilla Kipp is a writer in Townsend, Massachusetts.

Following successful surgery that, unexpectedly, sends his body into shock, Andrew Schulman lies in a coma in Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital’s Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU). Nothing is helping; death is near. Desperate, his wife Wendy reaches into her bag for her cell phone and instead finds the one thing she hopes might save him: his iPod. Gently placing one earbud in his ear and the other in her own, she plays his favorite, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Terrified it won’t help, or even make things worse, she waits. Waking the Spirit: A Musician's Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul is the patient’s own astounding account of what happens next.
NonfictionTravel

Celebrating our National Parks

Review by Priscilla Kipp

For those who may find it hard to accomplish their goals in a day’s time—or, as in this case, a year—we can be grateful that, according to an ancient Hawaiian legend, Maui lassoed the sun and made it promise to slow down its trek across the sky, so that his mother could get her work done. Be glad, too, that Mark Woods won a year’s sabbatical from his newspaper job to visit 15 national parks, a journey he shares in Lassoing the Sun. It becomes a dazzling experience indeed, one that honors the memory of his own mother and her inspiring love of the parks.

From sunrise on January 1 atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine, to sunset on December 31 on a volcano rim in Haleakala National Park in Hawaii, Woods serves as guide and guru as the National Park Service celebrates its first 100 years. The anniversary comes laden with questions about the future of the parks. What’s the best way to manage wildlife? How can the parks be protected from potentially destructive private interests, like uranium mining near the Grand Canyon? Will light pollution rob parks of their starry skies? How many climbers on Yosemite’s Half Dome are too many? Will rising seas doom Dry Tortugas National Park? What if the parks become irrelevant?

Woods folds these big questions around his own midlife angst and grief over his mother’s dying days near her beloved Saguaro National Park. Remembering his family’s past trips to the parks, and bringing along his wife and daughter as he revisits them, Woods weaves a timeline that traverses generations, raising more challenges for the future every step of the way.
 

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

For those who may find it hard to accomplish their goals in a day’s time—or, as in this case, a year—we can be grateful that, according to an ancient Hawaiian legend, Maui lassoed the sun and made it promise to slow down its trek across the sky, so that his mother could get her work done. Be glad, too, that Mark Woods won a year’s sabbatical from his newspaper job to visit 15 national parks, a journey he shares in Lassoing the Sun. It becomes a dazzling experience indeed, one that honors the memory of his own mother and her inspiring love of the parks.
NonfictionHistory

Bringing down the KKK

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Robert Shelton, George Wallace and Michael Donald may no longer be in the news, but they are forever entwined in this riveting account of a racist murder in the Deep South. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, by journalist and author Laurence Leamer, recounts 19-year-old Donald’s horrific death in 1981 at the hands of Alabama Ku Klux Klan members. The book is also a deftly researched history of the civil rights movement. Most vividly, it is the story of Morris Dees, born poor and white in solidly segregated Alabama, who abandoned his inherited segregationist leanings to become a civil rights attorney and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC’s civil lawsuit against the United Klans of America led to an unprecedented $7 million judgment against the group.

Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Alabama Klan, was driven to rage when murder charges against a black man resulted in a mistrial. Underlings turned hate into action: Two Klan members randomly selected, beat and strangled Donald, unlucky enough to be walking alone one night. They hung his body from a tree on a residential street. 

Wallace, about to win his fourth term as governor, had imbued his state with racist rhetoric, and the United Klans of America were his devoted supporters. They had met the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s with bombings, beatings and murders, and their power, like Wallace’s, remained largely unchallenged. Despite landmark civil rights legislation, with Donald’s murder, it appeared nothing much had changed in Alabama.

Yet times had changed, thanks to lawyers like Dees: One of Donald’s killers was eventually executed and his accomplice imprisoned. The SPLC’s lawsuit bankrupted the Alabama Klan. As for Shelton, before his death in 2003 he despaired, “The Klan is my belief, my religion. But it won’t work anymore. The Klan is gone. Forever.” Today, the Klan still exists. The Lynching reminds us why that matters.

 

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

Robert Shelton, George Wallace and Michael Donald may no longer be in the news, but they are forever entwined in this riveting account of a racist murder in the Deep South. The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, by journalist and author Laurence Leamer, recounts 19-year-old Donald’s horrific death in 1981 at the hands of Alabama Ku Klux Klan members. The book is also a deftly researched history of the civil rights movement. Most vividly, it is the story of Morris Dees, born poor and white in solidly segregated Alabama, who abandoned his inherited segregationist leanings to become a civil rights attorney and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
NonfictionLiterature

Convicts connect with classic literature

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Nine male convicted felons, serving long sentences for violent crimes, meet regularly with a sensitive, witty female professor inside a maximum security prison to read and discuss works by literary giants like Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, Poe and Shakespeare. What could go wrong? The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison is Mikita Brottman’s refreshingly straightforward account about all that did go right, as together they explored Heart of Darkness, The Black Cat, Lolita and other rather unlikely candidates for prison reading. 

Brottman is an Oxford-educated scholar volunteering within the grim walls of Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institute, bringing her deep love of literature to men who, she hopes, will find something meaningful for themselves in the books she cherishes. Her own troubled childhood led her to seek escape in such works; complex characters like Conrad’s Marlow and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, she reasons, may help these convicts reach a deeper understanding of themselves and each other. They seem willing to try. But the crushing weight of prison life—unrelenting boredom, punitive corrections officers, random lockdowns, solitary confinements, illnesses and violent gang fights—takes its toll. 

They all make mistakes here: Brottman misspeaks to a reporter and worries the club will be cancelled altogether. The men nod off when high or ill. She wonders why she ever thought reading about the pedophile and nymphet in Lolita was a good idea. Then again, they make her see Gregor’s transformation into a bug in Metamorphosis in an entirely new way.

Later, when two of the men are released and Brottman meets them “outside,” she discovers they have no more interest in reading literature. “On the inside,” she concludes, “I’d loved those men. But on the outside, I’d lost them. Because literature was all I had.” Not quite all: She tells her own good story here, too.

 

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

Nine male convicted felons, serving long sentences for violent crimes, meet regularly with a sensitive, witty female professor inside a maximum security prison to read and discuss works by literary giants like Conrad, Kafka, Nabokov, Poe and Shakespeare. What could go wrong? The Maximum Security Book Club: Reading Literature in a Men’s Prison is Mikita Brottman’s refreshingly straightforward account about all that did go right, as together they explored Heart of Darkness, The Black Cat, Lolita and other rather unlikely candidates for prison reading.
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.

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