A Choice of Weapons - Softcover

Parks, Gordon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0873517695 ISBN 13: 9780873517690

Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010

Synopsis

Gordon Parks (1912–2006)—the groundbreaking photographer, writer, composer, activist, and filmmaker—was only sixteen in 1928 when he moved from Kansas to St. Paul, Minnesota, after his mother's death. There, homeless and hungry, he began his fight to survive, to educate himself, and to fulfill his potential dream.

This compelling autobiography, first published in 1966, now back in print by popular demand and with a new foreword by Wing Young Huie, tells how Parks managed to escape the poverty and bigotry around him and to launch his distinguished career by choosing the weapons given him by "a mother who placed love, dignity, and hard work over hatred." Parks, the first African American to work at Life magazine and the first to write, direct, and score a Hollywood film, told an interviewer in 1999, "I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera."

Praise for A Choice of Weapons

"A perceptive narrative of one man's struggle to realize the values (defined as democratic and especially American) he has been taught to respect." —New York Times Book Review

"A lean, well-written memoir."—Time

About this title

About the Author:

Wing Young Huie is an acclaimed photographer and the author of several books including Frogtown and Looking for Asian America.

Review:

"An excellent introduction to what it must have been like to be black and ambitious--and poor--in America of a generation ago." -- Saturday Review, February 1966

About this edition

• Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0873517695
• ISBN 13: 9780873517690
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 296