Maggie's American Dream: The Life and Times of a Black Family - Softcover

Comer, James P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452263182 ISBN 13: 9780452263185

Publisher: Plume, 1989

Synopsis

This family success story centers on Maggie Comer, an unskilled, illiterate Black woman who rose from abject poverty in the rural South to become the mother of five college-educated children

About this title

About the Author:

JAMES P. COMER, M.D., is a Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center and Associate Dean of the Yale School of Medicine. He is the author of Beyond Black and White, Black Child Care, School Power, and many articles, including a regular column for Parents magazine.

From Publishers Weekly:

Maggie's eldest child, the first of her five offspring to achieve advanced degrees, here remembers three generations of his black American family. Resurrecting the tradition of oral family history, Comer, a child psychiatrist, transcribes his mother's reminiscences. She was born in Mississippi in 1904 and matured in an extended sharecropping family, struggling against rampant poverty and racism. Her indomitable spirit, pride and financial acumen would later provide her own children a standard of living unusually high for most blacks and many whites of the Depression years. Interesting contrast is provided in the book's second part by the autobiographical account of the author's formative years. Descriptions of his gentle father's intolerable working conditions at a steel mill, which led to his premature death, are heartbreaking. As the author shows, the quest for personal honor, intellectual excellence and economic success in our bigoted society remains the most valued parental legacy of Maggie's children.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0452263182
• ISBN 13: 9780452263185
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228