Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A foundation of expertise and excellence first laid 200 years ago continues to shape a Black family's groundbreaking legacy in this tenacious debut memoir from Daniel, president of McKissack & McKissack, America's oldest minority-owned construction firm. The author's Ashanti great-great-grandfather was enslaved and brought to America in 1790. At age 11, he was purchased in Charlotte, N.C., by William McKissack, an Irish builder who named him Moses McKissack and trained him as an expert artisan in carpentry and bricklaying; Moses eventually rose to foreman of McKissack's building crew. Just before the Civil War, McKissack's son moved to Tennessee and brought Moses's son to work as his own foreman. After Emancipation, the Nashville-area Black McKissacks went on to build college and university campus buildings, a Carnegie library, and Nashville's famous Maxwell House Hotel. Notable moments in her forebears' history and the author's career as a building professional are told in parallel: in 1866, Moses's son faced down the Ku Klux Klan; in 2002, Daniel faced down competition for a contract to work on Brooklyn's Barclays Center arena. Throughout, Daniel divulges intimate details about her personal and professional life, from relying on alcohol to deal with work stress to her struggles with the white "old boys' network" that dominates the construction industry. The result shines best as a candid career guide for Black professionals. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This book, written with Nick Chiles, is an excellent examination of one Black American family's rise from enslavement to become successful architects, builders, and businesspeople. The family trade started with Moses McKissack, a craftsman enslaved in 19th-century North Carolina whose children were eventually emancipated. The McKissacks established themselves in the building trades, despite facing racism, and went on to shape over a century's worth of buildings, from the Morris Memorial Building in 1920s Nashville to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport to Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field. Despite their success, the McKissacks are lamentably absent from most architectural histories. Author Daniel is now the fifth generation of McKissacks running her family's century-old business, the oldest minority- and woman-owned architecture and construction firm in the United States. Beyond her family history, she delves into the contemporary building trade and the dynamics of being a woman of color in a field dominated by white men. VERDICT Readers of business books, Black history, and architectural history will enjoy this work, an excellent addition for all library collections.--Heather DiMarco
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The head of an eminent Black-owned construction firm recounts her family's long history in the building trades. McKissack Daniel opens her memoir, which moves fluently from present to past and back again, with a distant ancestor who, at the age of 11, crossed the Middle Passage and, enslaved, was named Moses. William McKissack, the owner, "trained his slaves to be expert artisans in areas like carpentry and bricklaying," and they were so much in demand for their skills that, with Moses now a foreman, they traveled with some degree of freedom throughout the South. The following generation of McKissacks relocated to Nashville, with Moses II building the Maxwell House Hotel and, after emancipation, becoming a construction entrepreneur in a time and place where the KKK was vigorous in attacking Blacks who "showed too much independence." Fast forward to 2002: The author is the head of a firm that, although successful for generations, had to reckon with institutional and societal racism at every level--for example, during the Jim Crow era, when Blacks were barred from building for white customers and were forced to "carefully calibrate their demeanor…to ensure that they projected the proper deference." By the author's account, plenty of hurdles still remain. For instance, her firm was "grandfathered" past a New York state requirement that architecture businesses be owned 100% by licensed architects (as hers had long been) but then had its license revoked after white firms objected, angered by another requirement that they give 10% of their contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses. "In America," she writes, "so-called 'progress' often drops you off right where you started." Undeterred, she writes of pressing on all the same, taking part in a massive Brooklyn rebuilding project, branching into international markets, and bidding on new contracts that promise to keep the company busy for years to come. A well-crafted story of intergenerational striving on the path "from cruelty to commerce." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
