| Ticket to Exile | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 7 reviews)
Sales Rank: 655636
Category: Book
Author: Adam David Miller
Publisher: Heyday
Studio: Heyday
Manufacturer: Heyday
Label: Heyday
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Trade Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 237
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 1597140651
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9781597140652
ASIN: 1597140651
Publication Date: November 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
At age nineteen, A.D. Miller sat in a jail cell. His crime? He passed a white girl a note that read, "I would like to get to know you better." For this he was accused of attempted rape. Ticket to Exile recounts Miller's coming-of-age in Depression-era Orangeburg, South Carolina. Miller reconstructs the sights, sounds and social complexities of the pre-civil rights South, and his youth as a closet rebel who successfully evaded the worst strictures of a racially segregated small town. By the time he is forced into exile, we realize that this fate was inevitable for a young man too intelligent and aware of the limitations of his society to remain there without disastrous consequences.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
Frederick Douglass meets Scout and Big Fish in this uniquely American story May 23, 2008
With reading and storytelling as important background themes, we learn how one intelligent, sensitive and creative young black man survived Jim Crow's pre-WWII south. In Adam David Miller's memoir, "Ticket to Exile" we stand in an important American literary tradition that began with the slave narratives and carried on through the transitional work of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Alex Haley's "Roots" and even the the wild (yet deeply humane) work of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, and Zora Neale Hurston. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, the separation between whites and blacks was not so much a ghettoized apartheid as a separation enforced by the banal daily routines of institutional racism: humiliation, the constant aura of violence, and "laws" and customs meant to enforce powerlessness and subservience, both economic and cultural. In this south, blacks and whites lived near one another, their lives constantly intertwining and mutually influencing. Northerners often don't get this. Miller's writing places us smack-down in an "anytown" America through its uncanny descriptions of that rural/village setting, filtered through a child's lens. Here, people know each other's business all too well, and petty prejudices and stifling status markers play their painful roles. Neverthless--and here is the memoir's comic relief--people (and Miller) get by on their imaginations: storytelling lends a balance to harsh realities; even the stories of catching and eating vermin are not entirely repelling because of the oddly compelling form in which the memories are recounted. Miller's soft-spoken worldliness shows us, too, how West African roots express themselves in southern culture; I'd like more of this in our telling of American history. I love the details of how families and neighbors got along (or didn't) and Miller's understated poetic prose--there's nothing show-offy here, thank goodness. I had a visceral awareness of this time and place, and even when the going was exceptionally rough, I felt the writer's confident hand. The book left me with a deeper vision of race in America and of humanity in its larger sense, for, if anything, the book showed me how the manufacture of "race" always limits our humanity. This book should be required reading in schools, book-groups, and the halls of our political leaders.
EXIT TO EXILE March 8, 2008
VERY INTERESTING MEMOIR,THE IMPACT THAT DRIVE UKNOWN LIMITS TO COLOR PEOPLE,THIS STILL UNRESOLVE, THIS BOOK GIVES YOU THE BIG PICTURE HOW, BACK IN TIME THE WOLRD START TO DISSECT THEMSELVES AND NOT BEING RESPECTED AS REAL HUMANS BEING.
Ticket to Exile January 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ticket to Exile The book, Ticket to Exile is a rare intimate portrait of an intelligent mind trapped in an ignorant world. As I read this book I found it to be thought provoking and inspiring. As a person of color, I kept comparing my life to Mr. Miller's childhood. I was amazed by how resilient and resourceful my elders were in stark contrast to how easy my life is today. Ticket to Exile opened my eyes to the subtle and damaging aspects of internal and institutional racism as it was at that time and it made me reflect on how it continues today. If this book doesn't change your mind I hope that it changes your heart. As it has mine. Ticket to Exile is an affirmation of life. Thank you Mr. Miller! I highly recommend this book for all readers, book clubs and especially High School students.
An Honorable Man December 23, 2007
Adam David Miller's new memoir is a startling look back at a valuable life that was nearly extinguished by ignorance and fear. The book is a multi-faceted look at the human condition and how we treat one another in a world that would often have us consider one another the enemy. The fact is that Mr. Miller does himself great credit by not hammering on the idea that only white people were dangerous to existence, and emphasizing that race is not the only issue, but difference of any sort. This, despite the central fact that his tale is one of fear and oppression by white people. This lack of hyperbole gives credence to the basis for his story. Here is the tale of a man almost lynched by a mob of white men during the early 40's in the Jim Crow South, a tale that takes the time and care to cover all the ways in which human beings demean and punish one another for their individuality. In doing this, Mr. Miller makes it quite clear that there are good folks and bad folks, although he does not use that nomenclature, but that the hierarchy of oppression from white to black is only one sort of bigotry, and that horror begins with fear of difference. The central and underlying concept of the book impresses anyone who picks this volume up with its certain knowledge of what centuries of oppression does to those oppressed: to turn those of white skin against those whose blood contains so little as "one drop" of African-American blood, those of lighter color against those who have darker skin, male and female against one another, those with education and social standing against their less well-educated, well-heeled neighbors, those from one side of a town against those from the less-desirable address, and homophobes of whatever sexual orientation who fear they might become tainted by what a person does in the privacy of his or her own body against love, and those with the desire for love, however that might be defined. This moving book is the story of a town in the Jim Crow South, but it is also the story of anytown anywhere in the United States of its time - and of anytown anywhere today (despite the current emphasis on politically correct phraseology practiced in public). It is also the story of a boy turned man in one second by circumstances beyond his control, and beyond his ken at the moment he is betrayed. Mr. Miller's young life is held forfeit in the hands of a group of men who know him and his family and yet consider killing him because of his skin color. In addition, it is the story of all of us at that age (19) - bored with our hometown, looking for some new and interesting person/thing/idea, we leave the local setting and set out on our journey to human independence. The difference here is that Mr. Miller is thrown from one sort of exile into another, as much against his journey as his ancestors were against theirs. For most of us growing up with a wish for independence, we find ourselves in new territory, but Mr. Miller finds himself in terrifying new territory in the city jail, and later in completely new territory, both mentally and physically. It is a journey to independence as a human being, and Mr. Miller makes the telling of his odyssey with rare grace and aplomb. We can thank the framers of the Declaration of Independence (some of whom were slaveholders) for the quote "...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...," but we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Miller for having continued the tradition of citizens who fought for independence so that they might live in a way that honors the individual bravery and honor of all. This reminder is all the more ironic coming from a man whose ancestors were ripped from their own country and culture and exiled into enforced enslavement. Bravo, Mr. Miller! Next installment please!
A Wonderful Read December 4, 2007
What an immensely readable treasure. I smiled, I cried, I was provoked, riled against the injustices, 'bled' from the scab of hurt living with this history in my lap. I was kept on the edge of my seat for two nights even though the book is structured with the 'ending' first--what an accomplishment just on that note alone. I'm deliciously confused how the author kept the suspense and incredible tension going in flashback. So all this to say, I'm waiting for the 'next installment...' (a memoir covering the next period of years?)
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