MixedThe Associated PressThe stories are well written and easy to digest in small or larger increments. The storytelling jumps around a fair bit chronologically, which is occasionally confusing. Dating the chapters might help ... While Chambers writes honestly about racism, sexism and the opioid crisis in these pages, they are addressed sweepingly. This book is better for its glimpse into one extended family’s hardscrabble existence and the difference that an education can make.
Dovey Johnson Roundtree and Kate McCabe
PositiveThe Associated PressVery satisfying is getting to know towering civil and women\'s rights figures, such as Bethune and Thurgood Marshall, the latter well before he became the first African-American justice to join the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. There are many more, albeit lesser known, titans of civil rights that Roundtree makes familiar, particularly her Howard law professor, James Madison Nabrit Jr. ... It\'s like pulling up a seat to listen in as Roundtree details the long, slow and painful path to the U.S. Supreme Court\'s landmark \'Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka\' in 1954 that took on segregation in public education. ... The storytelling of these and others of Roundtree\'s cases — not only those with national civil rights consequences but criminal and civil cases as well — are riveting for their first-person accounting. And that she also became an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1961 — to then juggle both ministry and a successful law practice — is notable.