What You Don't Know Will Make a Whole New World

March 15, 2023
A coming-of-age memoir takes readers to the Bay Area of the late 1960s and '70s. "It was the first, best time to be a Black kid in this country," writes Lazard, and readers will be hard-pressed to disagree as they witness her flourishing against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement. The author moved with her mother and older brother from St. Louis to Haight-Ashbury in 1968, when she was 9. After an early spell in a St. Louis orphanage, where she was surrounded by "enshrouded white women and awful white kids who'd come up to you and rub your skin to see if the color could be rubbed off," Lazard was "delighted" with the vigorous diversity of her San Francisco elementary school, with "white kids, Chinese kids, Filipino kids, Mexican kids, Japanese kids, racially mixed kids, and, best of all, Negro kids like me." Later, in Oakland, she began "to understand how many types of Black kids there were. There were middle-class kids and working-class kids, kids with only a mom to take care of them, kids who were dirt poor. Our neighborhood held multitudes." As they moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, Lazard found space for herself within her bustling extended family, in the library, and as a Black woman. For the most part, the author adopts a smooth but formal style, but she has a knack for memorable turns of phrase: A cadre of Black teachers are "not simply Black [but] evangelically Black"; an obnoxious moviegoer is "dressed like the last pimp in California." Lazard's story may exemplify a cultural awakening experienced by many of her Black peers, but it is also intensely individual, shaped as much by her own family circumstances as by the world around her. "I foolishly never looked at my life as something anyone would want to read about," she writes toward the end of the memoir; readers are fortunate she got over that notion. Compelling and memorable.

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April 10, 2023
Lazard debuts with a moving chronicle of her life, from growing up in segregated late-1960s St. Louis to becoming a historian and librarian in the Bay Area, where she still lives. She recalls her mother’s epilepsy and how the illness resulted in her and her brother’s placement in a Catholic orphanage for three years, until their uncle arrived and took them to California, where Lazard started middle school. The book’s title is based on an admonition from Lazard’s grandmother: despite its intended chastising effect, the comment sparked a fire in the curious child to learn about herself and the world around her. That thirst for knowledge led to surreptitious visits to the library, where she “could spend the afternoon being an inventor, a prairie farmer, a runaway slave.” The author eloquently reflects on weighty subjects through the eyes of a child, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, Emmett Till’s murder, and the deaths of her parents. Lazard refers to her narrative as “my recovery mission to retrieve a time in my life that marked me more deeply than any other,” and she succeeds handily, thanks to rigorous scene-building and memorable characterizations of her family. This is a powerful account.