Its matter-of-factness and homely detail make Miller’s memoir a powerful reminder of what “separate but equal” really meant...
An African-American’s revealing recollections of growing up in the small South Carolina town of Orangeburg before and during the Great Depression.
Miller, a poet and teacher, opens with an account of the episode that ended his stay in the South, when at age 19 he composed the note that became his ticket to exile. Accompanying each chapter is a poem, usually brief, straightforward and drawn from personal experience. The first one, “Illumination,” is about the time he passed a note to a white girl that read, “I would like to get to know you better.” For this disregard for the niceties of Jim Crow laws, Miller was charged with attempted rape. The final chapter, in which he is smuggled out of town and banished to New York, ends with a poem reflecting on what didn’t happen and what might have been. Between are 11 chapters and 11 poems, all of which show in unsparing detail what life was like for a poor black boy growing up in the rural, segregated South. When a neighbor saw him walking to school barefoot in winter and bought him a pair of second-hand shoes for 75 cents, the incident becomes a poem, as do his memories of helping his mother wash other people’s clothes by hand and his encounter with Shorty the Iceman, who hired but didn’t pay the author for delivering ice one summer. Miller’s wretched poverty was worsened by racism. Barred from the town’s public library, he found books at a local state-college library; barred from the town swimming pool, he swam in the river. Another of many humiliations he was forced endure in the name of segregation was the division of the bathrooms in the local movie theater: one for white men, one for white “ladies” and one for “Coloreds.”
Its matter-of-factness and homely detail make Miller’s memoir a powerful reminder of what “separate but equal” really meant in the days before the Civil Rights Act.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59714-065-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Heyday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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