No comments about Green Patch: D-Day and Beyond.

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5 comments about Up from Slavery: An Autobiography.

1. Up from Slavery, autobiography by Booker T. Washington, is a true classic in African-American literature. Washington opens Chapter 1: "A Slave Among Slaves" with his vivid recollections as a Negro child growing up in the South: a slave on a plantation in Virginia, a white father he never knew, illiterate and living in horrid conditions. After the emancipation of slaves, Washington's family moves to West Virginia where he labors at the salt furnace and in the coal mines. In his precious few moments of spare time, he learns to read and gains enough confidence to leave everything behind to journey to the Hampton Institute. Later, because of his success at Hampton, he is given the opportunity to start Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Tuskegee Institute is successful partly due to Washington's extensive travel to the North to solicit funds for the school. The students at Tuskegee, in addition to the day-to-day traditional class work, are expected to learn an industrious trade and to work at mastering that trade. Based on his own life experience, Washington believes that the most prudent way the Negro race will persevere is through this combination of education, hard work and service to others. He believes that the White race will come to appreciate the Negro race only if the Negro people prove their worth to society. Because of his passive stance, many, such as W.E.B. DuBois, et. al., labeled Washington as "The Great Accomodator." In other words, accommodating those who were the enslavers instead of advocating for the rights of those who were enslaved. You can get a sense of this in Washington's most notable speech, the address to the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895:
   
   "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than artificial forcing."
   
   This speech brought national acclaim to Booker T. Washington and, at the time, placed him in the forefront as one of the leading authorities of his race.



2. Washington's relentlessly positive message is encouraging but at the same time too perfect for believability. The reader desires that Washington would once take off the mask of cheer that he appears to be putting over some parts of his autobiography and tell us what he really thinks.
   
   His optimism extended to the political status of African-Americans and their future integration into American society. As the constant threat of lynching and KKK-ism continued throughout most of the 20th Century, even as positive steps were made in racial integration, it appears his optimism was at best proven wrong, or at least premature. And it is easy to understand the criticism by other contemporary black leaders like W. E. B. DuBois for his easy optimism.
   
   But on the other hand, until and unless I read otherwise in a well-researched biography, perhaps Washington's optimism isn't a front or a mask to cover deep bitterness, but is true and sincere, and indeed, nothing in his story hear reads as if forced or fraudulent.
   
   I purchased this book at the small National Park bookstore at Booker T. Washington's birthplace in rural southwestern Virginia. The setting still matches the quiet and isolation that Washington describes, and lends credence to his tale of self-reliant optimism. I also purchased a National Park Service pamphlet Booker T. Washington: An Appreciation Of The Man And His Times, which makes a nice short companion to Washington's masterpiece.



3. Wow! What an amazing story! It is fascinating to read Booker T. Washington's account of a childhood in slavery followed by his rise to national prominence as the founder of the Tuskegee Institute.
   
   While some may argue that Washington was naive and overly accomodating, I was amazed at his ability to forgive and see the best in people. He did not nurse grudges or let others bring him down. Whether or not you feel that he should have spoken up more for judicial equality, you have to admit that he was a strong, dedicated man of character.
   
   Everyone: white, black, brown, or any other shade, can benefit from reading the autobiography of this great American.



4. Booker Ts story really inspires. It just shows that with positive thinking and motivation, tremendous difficulties, odds and challenges are beatable. It's a message many of us would gain from if we would just stop complaining and blaming others for our lot in life, and just get moving on up!
   
   I've reviewed the CreateSpace edition, ISBN 1438268165. It's a clear, easy to read version, well designed and the print and binding are excellent. Highly recommended!



5. i ordered Up from Slavery because I thought I needed to read it. However, I found I wanted to read it. I recommend it for all Americans. It was truely inspirational.

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1 comments about Joyful Trek: A Texan's Times and Travels.

1. I didn't know until this morning that Amazon sales ranks went as low as 5,100,000th. That is the rank assigned to my father's toothsome memoir, "Joyful Trek." Why a book this readable and informative should sink into those gloomy depths, I don't well understand. My dad, Robert H. Williams, was a West Texas farm boy who grew up to go to Harvard (all right, for only one semester, but that was on a graduate fellowship), to report for newspapers in Boston, Dallas, Denver, and elsewhere, to sail around the world as a radio operator in the Merchant Marine, to see combat in both world wars, and to invent a mailing machine and sell it for enough that he could finally return to Texas and be a rancher. His memoir is full of detailed and zestful stories. Here is a sample, set in 1921, when he was job-hunting in Galveston, Texas:
   
   "Just about sundown, passing for the nth time a sign which said 'SEAMAN'S EMPLOYMENT BUREAU,' I stuck my head in the door. I did not especially want to go to sea, and how could there be a vacancy when hundreds of old seadogs were on the beach.
   
   "A big man about fifty with bulging midsection was talking on the telephone. I presently got his drift: a ship was looking for a radio operator. I had little notion of the duties of a ship's radio operator and not the slightest knowledge of the kind of wireless equipment aboard a ship. I was, however, an expert with a key and had a fair knowledge of radio theory and of CW (continuous wave) equipment, meaning equipment using the then-new three-element vacuum tubes. The man on the telephone must have seen that I was listening with interest, and I mumbled, while he was talking, that I had been radio officer for the First Army Air Service. Instantly he said, 'Hold it! I've got you an operator.'
   
   "I was flabbergasted. I tried to tell him that I had no idea what the job required, but he had already hung up. He was not even slightly concerned about my protest. He almost pushed me into a Cadillac parked at the curb and drove me round the bay to the waiting ship. He said he was port captain. As I kept trying to protest, he explained that the important thing to the ship's owners was to have on board a radio operator so the owners could get insurance. In view of my qualifications, for which he simply took my word, asking not a single question, they could sign me on temporarily without a license. That did not entirely satisfy me, but a job was a job. And the sudden vision of the kind of job it might be began to tantalize me."
   
   I give "Joyful Trek" four stars instead of five lest my closeness to the author and his subjects might influence me. But I am sure that if I had never heard of Robert H. Williams I would find his book absorbing--a vivid account of an energetic and imaginative life that took in most of the twentieth century and a bit of the nineteenth.

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