A well-researched, informative, readable biography.
Scholar and activist Ransby (History and Gender Studies/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 2002) deftly details the accomplishments, struggles and impact of Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson.
Robeson’s life, writes the author, “was set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, World War II, the Cold War, African decolonization, and the early rumblings of the U.S. Black Freedom movement.” Though Essie’s husband, the well-known artist and activist Paul Robeson, has been the subject of multiple biographies and numerous articles, her accomplishments have not garnered the in-depth attention they deserve. Ransby outlines Essie’s early life and family history, delves into the high points of her married life in Harlem, and recounts her growing awareness and tenacious engagement in the numerous political causes she supported. Beginning in the 1920s, Essie was deeply involved in the international art scene, corresponding with giants like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf and Noel Coward. By the ’40s, Robeson’s political consciousness emerged, and she became an outspoken proponent for racial justice in the United States and “freedom and self-determination” for people around the world. During the McCarthy era, Essie and Paul suffered persecution for their political views and personal relationships. Ultimately, their passports were revoked for nearly a decade, causing the couple great financial hardship. Upon regaining their freedom to travel, the couple relocated abroad for five years. When they returned to America in 1963, a shift had occurred, and the Black Freedom movement was stirring. Known as a journalist, anthropologist and public speaker, Essie repeatedly spoke out on the evils of colonialism and racism in America, and she supported independence movements in India and Africa.
A well-researched, informative, readable biography.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-12434-7
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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