2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Truly Human Voice From the Civl Rights Era, June 3, 2003
This review is from: Wit, Will & Walls (Paperback)
My wife and I alternately laughed and cried through the winter Saturday we read this book aloud to one another.
"Wit, Will and Walls" is the first book I've encountered that successfully conveys what it actually FELT like to be one of the the African American children to break the apartheid grip of Jim Crow on schools in the American South. Betty Fisher's honest, heartfelt style is totally without pretense, and conveys all the conflicts, fears and courage of the young African American children who, sometimes against their will, were selected to take part in that dramatic moment in history.
Fisher's voice is so authentic that it will do no harm for me to tell you a bit of what it covers:
Fisher was 14 years old in 1959 when she walked into the all white Warren County High School in Front Royal, Va., with the first young blacks ever to enter those doors. For many months the black students attended school alone while whites boycotted it. Along the line, the Kilbys withstood terrors ranging from mutilation of the family's animals by white thugs, shots fired through the Kilby home.
The Kilby family struggle had started long before 1959, when her father, family patriarch James Kilby, took on Old Virginia's deeply rooted racist system. Like his father before him, James Kilby had been raised in what can only be called inter-generational semi-slavery on a farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Ultimately, James Kilby stood up and led his family on their journey through terror, isolation and repeated defeats toward victory in a U.S. Supreme Court decision and educational opportunity for his children equal to that of white society.
Author Betty Kilby went on to change the management policy of Rubbermaid Corporation, and a successful management career in the airline industry.
Sorrowing, yet often humorous, Fisher manages to covey the warmth and joy and hopefullness that also peremated her family's life, even amid the tumult of the times. It is more than just her autobiography. What makes the book special is that it is also a family saga still in progress. It is an American epic spanning generations of Kilbys, with many frank forays into such areas as the "kitchen babies," sired by her family's white bosses, right up to the heartbreak of her own daughter's addiction to crack cocaine.
In all likelihood, most readers have never taken such an authentic journey, or met a warmer, more honest spokesperson for that dramatic era which so changed America.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Warm and sincere but definitely a memoir, February 7, 2010
This review is from: Wit, Will & Walls (Paperback)
I will admit at the outset that I was assigned this book as part of a class. While Ms. Fisher's stories are interesting and give a rare first-hand look at the agonizingly byzantine and passionate process of desegregation, the book is not entirely edited and the writing is often hard to follow. In addition, many incidents which do not add to the storyline or the study of civil rights are included which detract from the larger narrative arc.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Passionate Wit, January 23, 2005
This review is from: Wit, Will & Walls (Paperback)
I enjoyed this book. I had never heard of Betty Kilby Fisher prior to reading the book, but I agree that her story had to be told, preserved in book form and made available to the world.
The bookcover photo says more than words could ever say. I highly recommend this book not only to adults, but to young adults (High School Age) also. The author selected a title that was very fitting.
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