This assignment is for a book review, not simply a book report. You Essay

This assignment is for a book review, not simply a book report. You will be expected to analyze and critique the book in additi - Essay Example Because of its stark telling of events, and its refusal to shy away from the darker moments of American history, the book Coming of Age in Mississippi should be required reading for anybody who wants to really understand what it was like for America to arrive at a time when people are more or less treated equally. The book is organized into four different sections, each one of which tells about a different time in Moody's life. There is one for her childhood, one for high school, one for when she was in college, and the last section is about her time in the civil rights movement trying to get the vote and other rights for African-Americans. Moody's childhood was not exactly happy, as her mother was poor and her abusive father left them. She had to work from an early age after school just so her family could afford food. In high school, things do not get much better as one of the boys she knows is killed by the Klu Klux Klan and she has to continue working, often for white people who do not treat her much better than they would treat a slave. Because of all this harsh treatment in her youth, Moody shows that she started to get way too interested in things like the KKK and lynchings and racial inequality. Many of her friends and family did not like this in her and that made things even more stressful. Moody was able to get a scholarship to play basketball in college and so is able to get a good higher education. It is during her college years that she decides to join the NAACP, which only makes her relationship with her family worse. This is because she and her family all start to receive threats from the various white people they know. The last part of the book is kind of redeeming and depressing at the same time. Moody joins the civil rights movement and goes to rural parts of the south to try and convince African-Americans to register to vote so they can get treated equally. Interestingly even here Moody is seen as sometimes too serious, and she does not neces sarily get along all the time with the other people in the movement. The end of the book is the most depressing part. Moody is on a bus going to Washington with a bunch of other activists and while they sing about how they shall eventually overcome oppression, she does not join in. She thinks of the violence and hatred in the south, and wonders if it will ever be over and if the movement will ever really have succeeded at what it set out to do by trying to get equality. The book Coming of Age in Mississippi, despite its depressing ending and much of the distressing events in it, really moved me as a person. I think of all the violence that African-Americans had to endure here in America, and it makes me mad. It’s especially disturbing to me since I am from middle-class white Texas and have also lived in Mississippi. While I would like to think my neighbors would not be the same as the people in the book if they had lived in the time period Moody writes about it is impossible to know for sure. I’m sure that some African-Americans who live in the south today are still treated unequally, although I hope not to the same degree as in the book. Although I do think the book does a good job of showing the darker side of events, I feel like there is not really very much about the good things. I think it would have been