Up Home
One Girl's Journey
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- 8,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Simmons’s evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“A riveting work of literature, destined to take its place in the canon of great African American autobiographies.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Bloomberg, BET
I was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroad in North Houston County in East Texas.
Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.
In Up Home, Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are young shape who we become. We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large family with an often empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his youngest daughter’s dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child.
From the farmland of East Texas to Houston’s Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity guide her as she creates a place for herself in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Simmons, who became the first Black president of an Ivy League institution in 2001 when she took that position at Brown University, chronicles the first 22 years of her life, in this poignant and inspiring memoir. Born to sharecroppers in 1945 Daly, Tex., Simmons was the youngest of 12 children. As soon as she was able to work, she joined her father, mother, and siblings in the cotton fields; though she felt "nestled in the bounty of family's care," Simmons's active imagination fostered her desire to escape "to distant, forbidden regions." Following her mother's death when she was a teenager, Simmons began to plot a path out of Texas, excelling in high school and earning a scholarship to Dillard University in New Orleans. There, she thrived, winning a Fulbright scholarship and admission to Harvard's PhD program in romance languages. Though she ends the narrative at her college graduation, which may disappoint readers seeking insights into her career, Simmons skillfully maps the contours of her young mind and sets the stage for future volumes that explore her time in academia. The author's humility ("I do not regard the circumstances of my childhood as more difficult or more glorious than another's") and tenderness make this a fiercely memorable debut.
