A Walker in the City

Kazin's memoir is a very engaging read. I like how the reader has the feeling of being taken on a tour through his home (his actual home and the part of the city in which he lives) and also a tour through his family history. I really find the dynamic between the different nationalities of the authors we've seen so far to be incredibly interesting and important. In each autobiography, we've seen suffering, but it's interesting to see how the foreign writers all eventually make their way to America to acquire freedom, which was ironically where Douglass was literally enslaved. Douglass's memoir brings about shame, horror, and embarrassment in the country's history, but also shows a bit of hope and what was to come. Moving on to the rest of the memoirs, Danticat's is probably the most devastating with the family tragedies that occurred, but America was her family's beacon of light. With Kazin, we see his roots grab hold in Brownsville and create a new microcosm of his family's heritage.

"The light pouring through window after window in that great empty varnished assembly hall seemed to me the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. It was that thorough varnished cleanness that was of the new land, that light dancing off the glasses of Theordore Roosevelt..." (page 26)