Word: parkers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...painted with hackneyed strokes. While a smattering of books have attempted to redress this problem, among them Jill Nelson's 1993 memoir, Volunteer Slavery, the lives of these women beg for further elaboration. Happily, Nelson's new memoir, Straight, No Chaser (Putnam; 225 pages; $23.95), and Gwendolyn M. Parker's Trespassing (Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $23) provide some of the missing detail...
Though both writers were raised in black middle-class communities by parents who emphasized education and achievement, the sensibilities and sensitivities that inform their respective journeys are markedly different. Where journalist Nelson is angry and agitated, attorney Parker is searching and painfully revealing. Nelson seeks common cause with all black women, whom she sees as suffering from a collective case of "invisibility and erasure"; Parker strives to delineate individuals, appreciating the "thousands of moments that [make] us fundamentally different from each other." Nelson remonstrates, with fist-in-the-air rhetoric leavened by wry humor; Parker demonstrates, depicting each moment with...
...Parker's memoir, by contrast, is a carefully constructed and subtle rendering of a richly textured life. The "first black woman" wherever she went--prep school, Radcliffe, a tony law firm--Parker deftly mines the universal in experiences that bear both the good fortune and freight of a privileged birthright. Her warm evocation of her childhood in Durham, N.C., where she ate several dinners each day to satisfy the neighbors who beckoned, "Gwennie Mac, come on in," makes you hunger for a time when children were everyone's responsibility...
...sting of the white teachers who refuse to acknowledge Parker's raised hand, the blacks who see her as extensions of their own agendas, and the white attorneys who question her presence at meetings are all equally palpable. In the end, Parker succeeds where Nelson fails: she shows what it means to be invisible and erased...
...amalgam of clever references never really comes together, and it's hard to figure out what Parker and Stone are using their show to say beyond the fact that eight-year-old boys are silly and the world is filled with many useless celebrities. Unlike The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head, South Park is devoid of subtext--it isn't really about the emptiness of suburban life or the ugliness of youthful nihilism or the perniciousness of popular culture. Nevertheless, it can deliver many funny moments, and Parker and Stone may very well grow up someday...