An African-American woman's plight to properly grieve for her murdered brother while untangling her own psychological hang-ups.
In her debut memoir, former Washington Post columnist Britt offers an introspective account of growing up in Gary, Ind., a small, industrial town most famous for having earned the title "murder capital of the United States.” The city maintained its reputation, though Darrell's death was unique in that it came at the hands of a pair of Gary police officers who claimed they'd been attacked. "Even in Gary,” writes Britt, “the shooting of the most undistinguished white man usually warranted more than a newsprint shrug. But Darrell was black ordinary, which meant his life didn't matter much.” Beginning her career as a journalist, the author remained attentive to issues of race, though she struggled with her personal relationships with black men, giving far too much of herself to undeserving partners. This was particularly true after she became yoked to her drug-addled first husband, who emptied Britt's bank account and sold the family car for a high. Her second marriage, while stronger on the surface, endured its own set of problems, including her husband's affair. While Britt initially positions herself as the perpetual victim, by the end of the book she begins to understand her complicity in her choices, coming to terms with her husband's infidelity as well as the death of her brother. The author is at her best when grappling with these complex relationships shared between African-American men and women: "Ours is a dance of mutual affection and hostility, dependence and distrust, fascination and resentment.” Yet Britt makes clear that it is also a dance of owning up to hard truths and facing the worst of life head-on. A probing psychological exploration that delves to rarely tapped depths.
Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-02184-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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