Soldier: A Poet's Childhood

Soldier: A Poet's Childhood
by June Jordan

Soldier: A Poet's Childhood
List Price: $15.95
Our Price: $6.50
You Save: $9.45 (59%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.67 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions


(Click here)
Buy this book at online book store in your country
Canada | UK | Germany | France

Book Summary Information

Author: June Jordan
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-04-23
ISBN: 0465036821
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9780465036820
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

Book Reviews of Soldier: A Poet's Childhood

Book Review: I really liked this book.
Summary: 5 Stars

I will be interested to read some of this authors poetry. Her memoir read like a free verse poem--or a prose. The author had a very smooth way of writing and I was left with wanting to read more about her life. Once I could sit down and read it..I read it completely. I will begin my search for the author and what else she has written right now. Happy reading! :)

Summary of Soldier: A Poet's Childhood

Some of Us Did Not Die Brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.
"There was a war on against colored people," June Jordan recalls her father telling her. "I had to become a soldier." Jordan's fierce, funny, lyrical memoir of her first 12 years reveals the seeds of her adult poetry in her childhood experiences: the magical sounds of words in the nursery rhymes her mother crooned, the awareness nearly from birth of the bitter complexities of family relations. Jordan's father (depicted in a brilliantly nuanced portrait) was a proud Jamaican immigrant who encouraged his daughter to read and took her to museums and to Carnegie Hall, but also called her "damn black devil child" and beat her for the slightest misstep. He moved his family from a Harlem housing project to their own home in Brooklyn, enrolled June at a white boarding school, and fought savagely with his wife, who argued, "The child is a Black girl ... you gwine to make her afraid to be sheself!" Jordan reproduces the rhythms of West Indian speech as vividly as she captures African American culture of the 1930s and '40s in a poignant autobiography that, for all its racial particularity, tells an all-American story of the charged emotional legacy bequeathed by parents striving to give their children a better life. --Wendy Smith

Authors Books

Book Subjects
Most talked about in Authors Books
Bloomsbury Recalled ImageBloomsbury Recalled
by Quentin Bell
Columbia University Press; Published: 1997-01-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.36
Price in other shops: $29.00
William Tyndale: A Biography ImageWilliam Tyndale: A Biography
by David Daniell
Yale University Press; Published: 1994-11-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $62.92
Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America ImageNeither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America
by Kathleen Ann Myers
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2003-08-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.00
Price in other shops: $45.00
Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics) ImageStorm of Steel (Penguin Classics)
by Ernst Jünger
Penguin Classics; Published: 2004-05-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.50
Price in other shops: $16.00
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life ImageSurprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
by C.S. Lewis
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 1995-11-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $10.22
Price in other shops: $18.00
Roughing It (The Penguin American Library) ImageRoughing It (The Penguin American Library)
by Mark Twain
Penguin Classics; Published: 1981-12-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.64
Price in other shops: $16.00
Life Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98 ImageLife Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98
by George Dawson, Richard Glaubman
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2001-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.59
Price in other shops: $15.00
Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) ImageShakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)
by Bill Bryson
Harper Perennial; Published: 2008-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops: $13.99
The Professor and the Madman CD ImageThe Professor and the Madman CD
by Simon Winchester
HarperAudio; Published: 2005-10-04; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $8.47
Price in other shops: $14.95
Alexander Hamilton: A Life ImageAlexander Hamilton: A Life
by Willard Sterne Randall
Harper; Published: 2003-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.86
Price in other shops: $32.50
Similar Books and other products
Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture ImageWild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture
Seal Press; Published: 1999-11-16; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.20
Price in other shops: $16.00
June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint ImageJune Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint
Routledge; Published: 1995-10-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $38.19
Price in other shops: $48.95
A Place to Stand ImageA Place to Stand
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Grove Press; Published: 2002-06-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.20
Price in other shops: $15.00
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure ImageTwo or Three Things I Know for Sure
by Dorothy Allison
Plume; Published: 1996-08-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops: $12.00
The Vagina Monologues ImageThe Vagina Monologues
by Eve Ensler
Villard; Published: 2007-12-26; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.79
Price in other shops: $15.00
Winter's Bone: A Novel ImageWinter's Bone: A Novel
by Daniel Woodrell
Back Bay Books; Published: 2007-07-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.54
Price in other shops: $13.99
ZaatarDiva ImageZaatarDiva
by Suheir Hammad
Cypher Books; Published: 2008-10-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.95
The Little Locksmith: A Memoir ImageThe Little Locksmith: A Memoir
by Katharine Butler Hathaway
The Feminist Press at CUNY; Published: 2000-07-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.99
Price in other shops: $14.95
Autobiography of a Face ImageAutobiography of a Face
by Lucy Grealy
Harper Perennial; Published: 2003-03-18; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.81
Price in other shops: $13.99
Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan ImageDirected by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
by June Jordan
Copper Canyon Press; Published: 2007-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.46
Price in other shops: $24.00
Book store. Illustrated catalog of books on different categories