Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 CARY | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In 1972 Lorene Cary, a bright, ambitious teenager from Philadelphia, went as a scholarship student to a formerly all-white, all-male (and still unapologetically elite) school in New Hampshire. She was determined to suceed--without selling out. This wonderfully frank and perceptive memoir describes the perils and ambiguities of that double role.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
YA-- A streetwise kid from West Philly, Cary was the first African-American female to attend St. Paul's, a prestigious New England prep school. With tremendous drive, she set out to achieve self-imposed academic, athletic, and social goals. Although she believed she owed it to the school that accepted her on scholarship, to her family who encouraged and sacrificed, and to those who will come after, she found that the price was great. The emotional distance from her family widened with the geographic separation, and their deep love and pride could not make up for their blindness to her discomfort. While Cary achieved most of her aims, thus justifying the experience to herself, perceptive readers will be pained at her need to do so. Broader in scope than most coming-of-age memoirs, this candid account is sure to strike a sympathetic chord.--Jackie Gropman, Richard Byrd Library, Springfield, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1971, a 15-year-old black girl from suburban Philadelphia won a scholarship to an elite prep school, St. Paul's in Concord, N.H. Cary here recounts--with cautious affection and ironic humor--the catapulting experience, having returned years later to St. Paul's as a teacher. Drawing a warm portrait of supportive family members, she also establishes the strong qualifications and gifts she brought to the school, at the time newly co-educational. We glimpse the personal resources that sustained her through a demanding curriculum and in the face of latent, lingering racial prejudice. Written with flair, her attractive memoir provides a unique viewpoint, that of student and teacher, mediating a world of educational privilege and providing inspiration for other black students. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A thoughtful coming-of-age memoir by a young black woman admitted on scholarship in the 70's to the wealthy, elite, and overwhelmingly white world of St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. Cary's white teachers and schoolmates were, in general, strenuously liberal, so she experienced only a few racial insults, mostly ones born of naivetÉ or insensitivity (""I always kind of wondered if, like, black guys and white guys were, like different,"" one girl, giggling, confided). This lack of any overt prejudice to react against turned Cary and the other black students at St. Paul's in on their own self-doubt and made them act out in ways that perplexed them (Cary pilfered change and jewelry from schoolmates' rooms; another student was caught shoplifting). The central metaphor here lies in a tale told by Cary's West Indian great-grandfather, about an island woman who nightly left her husband's bed to slide out of her skin, leaving it draped over a chair, and fly around in the darkness, returning to her skin at dawn. One night her husband salted the skin, and when his wife tried to slip back into it, it burned her. Cary's quest in this book is for a way to fly without betraying or being betrayed by her skin. She is bearing a burdensome freight: not only her own ambitions but the expectations of her family and her sense of obligation ""to play my part in that mammoth enterprise--the integration, the moral transformation, no less, of America."" The day-to-day account of boarding-school life is overly detailed, but an earthy humor, some fine lyrical writing, and the insights Cary offers into what it is like to be bright, black, and female in today's America amply reward the reader's perseverance. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Black ice is "a clear, glittering ice. . . . The surface acts like a prism to break winter sun into a brilliant spectrum of browns." Cary's triumphant autobiography is, indeed, black ice, freeze-framing the past for in-depth examination, refracting assumptions into truths. In 1971, Cary was halfway through high school in a Philadelphia suburb when she was told that St. Paul's, a New Hampshire boarding school and longtime bastion of upper-class white males, had gone coed and was interested in enrolling young black women. In a narrative glistening with emotional nuance and crystal integrity, Cary replays her complex and demanding experiences at St. Paul's. Adolescence is always a time of displacement and confusion, but for Cary the usual traumas were compounded by her role as a token black. She felt tremendous pressure to succeed in this rarefied arena and struggled with harsh self-analysis that found achievements suspect, difficulties deserved--the inherited mind-sets of being a woman and black in the U.S. In the end, Cary taught herself how to glide above these old fears and prejudices, and now, generously and eloquently, tells her resplendent story to mark the path. ~--Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
In 1972, Cary left her black suburban Philadelphia neighborhood to attend St. Paul's, an elite, formerly all-male prep school in New Hampshire. In these memoirs she describes the tumultuous transitions this new life engenders, as well as the inevitable racism over which she triumphs. After graduating, she returns to St. Paul's as a teacher. Cary tells her story well and with great description, but only at the book's end does the reader understand what she gained and lost as a result of her experience. Given her unique perspective, her narrative would have been much more interesting had she concentrated more on her tenure as a teacher and trustee, and how she responded to people as a result of her experience, instead of relying so much on recounting her school days. For large collections only.-- Danna C. Bell, Marymount Univ . Lib., Arlington, Va. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.