Soldier: A Poet's Childhood [Hardcover]

June Jordan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2000

<DIV>A profoundly moving childhood memoir by a noted poet, essayist, teacher, and journalist.<SHORTA not uncommon story is here captured with astonishing beauty—the childhood of a gifted daughter whose immigrant parents must struggle in order to provide her with the educational and social opportunities not available to them or, for that matter, to most blacks of her generation.In vivid prose that re-creates the heady impressions of youth, June Jordan takes us to the Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods where she lived and out into the larger landscape of her burgeoning imagination. Exploring the nature of memory, writing, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.</Div>

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"There was a war on against colored people," June Jordan recalls her father telling her. "I had to become a soldier." Jordan's fierce, funny, lyrical memoir of her first 12 years reveals the seeds of her adult poetry in her childhood experiences: the magical sounds of words in the nursery rhymes her mother crooned, the awareness nearly from birth of the bitter complexities of family relations. Jordan's father (depicted in a brilliantly nuanced portrait) was a proud Jamaican immigrant who encouraged his daughter to read and took her to museums and to Carnegie Hall, but also called her "damn black devil child" and beat her for the slightest misstep. He moved his family from a Harlem housing project to their own home in Brooklyn, enrolled June at a white boarding school, and fought savagely with his wife, who argued, "The child is a Black girl ... you gwine to make her afraid to be sheself!" Jordan reproduces the rhythms of West Indian speech as vividly as she captures African American culture of the 1930s and '40s in a poignant autobiography that, for all its racial particularity, tells an all-American story of the charged emotional legacy bequeathed by parents striving to give their children a better life. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Known for her fiery protest poems and her sensitive portrayals of children, poet and novelist Jordan (Naming Our Destiny) offers a fast-moving memoir of her early years. "Born on the hottest day in Harlem" to West Indian immigrants, Jordan was largely shaped by her ambitious and hardworking but sometimes abusive father: she would be his "sturdy, brilliant soldier, or he would, well, beat me to death." When Jordan turned five, in 1941, the family moved to Brooklyn; shortly thereafter she became a pugnacious, sociable child, shuttling among fantasies, friends and teachers, and the unstable expectations of her home life. Remarkable passages cover Jordan's youthful obsession with cowboy heroes, "deep-sea fishing" with her protective father and early experiences with religion. Jordan (a professor of African-American Studies at UC-Berkeley) has selected a bitty, broken-up format: single paragraphs, sentences, anecdotes and prose sketches succeed one another as if in a photo album or a book of short poems. (Sometimes Jordan even breaks into verse.) This can make her work scattered or sketchy; it can also imbue single incidents or memories with remarkable resonance. At her best, Jordan writes as if for oral delivery: Jodi, her best friend at summer camp, "had tiger eyes and a lion's mane for hair and she chewed gum so that it cracked near her chipped front tooth and her skin turned the same color as my own skin from the sun." Jordan could easily have written a tear-jerking story of trauma and recovery, or a densely sociological document. Instead, she weaves early disasters, delights and difficulties into a thoughtful, often cheerful tale about the girl she wasAone who found herself (as a chapter title has it) constantly "choosing and being chosen, fighting and fighting back." Agent, Gloria Loomis. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Civitas Books; 1ST edition (May 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465036813
• ISBN-13: 978-0465036813
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,394,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, simply excellent., May 22, 2000

By 

Michael J Woznicki "Michael J Woznicki" (Holland, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (Hardcover)

Over the past 40 years civil rights has come a long way and progress has been made in areas that makes life easier. But imagine if you had to struggle with poor education, terrible living conditions, and even segregation. Now imagine trying to get ahead in a world and society that was making all this an impossible task.

June Jordan takes you on a twelve year journey through the eyes of one person who life was given these circumstances and somehow managed to succeed and become one of the most successful people, her own. June Jordan tells a story through words and poems that has you stopping and thinking throughout the entire 260 pages.

The book is one of the first I have read that makes a clear representation of how a child caught up in turmoil can block out what they see and find something good in the life they have been given. Jordan's ability to capture the reader makes this book one of the most impressive I have read so far this year.

After reading this book and seeing how the tough and often overbearing father along with the serine and religious mother were at odds, I gained a deeper understating of how difficult it must have been for any African American to try to make and succeed in the white man's world.

Jordan has written several other books and has won a number of prestigious awards over the years. I found this book enjoyable and easy to read. Take time out and follow through the 12 years with a child who I found dealt with the same things I did as a child, only Jordan had them magnified. An excellent book!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming and Powerful, July 20, 2000

By 

R. Riis "rriis" (NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (Hardcover)

Sure to be a classic. A wonderfully charming and moving series of memories, observations, and poetic passages about a childhood at turns sweet, innocent, and difficult. Sometimes children make the most clear-eyed and wise observers, and it is the rare adult, such as June Jordan, who can recapture and communicate the experience of childhood in both its wonder and bewilderment. Although the elements of Jordan's childhood are specific - 19302/1940s, brusque, occaisionally-violent immigrant father, Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods, racial and social inequity - the themes are universal. Wonderful!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a story that does justice to a difficult childhood, May 11, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (Hardcover)

June Jordan is not a victim. She shows us that difficult childhoods aren't as straightfoward as that. Her violent father may have taught her to solve problems with violence, but he also taught her to be observant. The best part of this book is that we hear the words and see places that influenced Jordan's writing style: her father, her Uncle Teddy, New York of the 30's and 40's.