Review by Booklist Review
Secrets, silence, and invisibility define African American women's lives, urges Nelson, whose Volunteer Slavery (1993) traced her years as the first black female staffer at the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. In Straight, No Chaser, she uses memoir to illuminate the movements, ideologies, and conventional wisdom of the past several decades, with pungent comments on leaders and events (e.g., Roy Innis, Louis Farrakhan, Reverend Al Sharpton, the Million Man March) and a heartfelt call for African American women to define themselves in defiance of white politicians' stereotypes and of demands to protect black male egos. Nelson's rage--"[This] culture . . . despises women and black people most of all. I am a two-fer in American hell" --is matched by hope: "We need to stop lying . . . and honestly examine our real lives as women: our secondary status, the political, economic, and sometimes personal violence we live with, the aspirations . . . so often subsumed by the needs of others. If we do this, we can begin to develop new ideas of what it means to be a black woman." To be serialized in Essence and promoted in a 12-city author tour, so expect interest. (Reviewed July 1997)0399142622Mary Carroll
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Black women, declares Nelson (Volunteer Slavery) in this tart, forceful book, are too often demonized or ignored by the majority society. An offspring of the New York City of the 1950s and 1960s, a world with few black female role models, she remains angry that the beauty industry markets "whiteness as the norm" and that blacks still prize lighter skin. Her dentist father left the family while she was a teenager, blaming the pains of racism, while her mother dismissed her husband as crazy. The author, an unmarried mother at 22, was accused of child abuse because she put her daughter on a macrobiotic diet, and she here expresses anger at the authorities. Most potent are her criticisms of black women who prop up patriarchyfrom nationalist matriarch Queen Mother Moore, who endorsed polygamy, to those who supported the Million Man Marchand of black leaders who have done little to change society. Nelson's husband once beat her, and if the links she makes between domestic and political violence (i.e., entitlement cuts) are strained, she also shows how popular culture demeans black women. Inspired by heroines such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Nelson took her activism beyond rhetoric by helping lead an effort to stop a 1995 Harlem rally on behalf of Mike Tyson. Her advice to black women: organize and channel the voice of the collective "niggerbitchfit"a term she coined to reject invisibility and disrespect. First serial to Essence; author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The controversial author of Volunteer Slavery on gender, race, and growing up. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Nelson's memoir of growing up as a black female in a racist, sexist America is a poor entry in a desperately needed genre. ``I write because I'm angry,'' Nelson declares in her introduction, setting the tone for the rest of this ranting and scattered book. She shifts awkwardly between personal anecdotes (including her 1950s and '60s girlhood in Harlem and and on Manhattan's Upper West Side) and essays on the problems she sees manifested in them, never really revealing her own inner complexities. The birth of Nelson's child becomes an opportunity to discuss racism, her relationships with men become excuses for essays on sexism, and the book's closing chapter is devoted to her ideas on violence and negative role models. As an African-American woman, Nelson says she is forced to stand on the bottom rung of the social ladder, and she devotes much of her book to allocating blame--to white men, white women (including feminists), and black men. The African-American world as seen through Nelson's eyes is filled only with negatives: Supermodel Naomi Campbell is just ``white beauty in black face''; African-American male sexuality is really ``poontang proximity''; black leaders are ``by and large useless opportunists''; and African-American women are all too often prone to having a ``Niggerbitchfit.'' Even Coretta Scott King and Betty Shabazz are belittled as mere ``professional widows.'' By the end, the reader has gained little insight into either Nelson or black America; this is especially disappointing since her experiences as a journalist for the Washington Post--chronicled in Volunteer Slavery (1993)--provide the author with a unique perspective. Underdeveloped and unoriginal, this tirade fails to become the tool of empowerment for African-American women it claims to be. (First serial to Essence; author tour)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
