Stronger in research than storytelling, Adler reveals the man beneath the myth, detailing the life that spawned the legend.
Well-researched revelations about the union martyr and prolific protest songwriter.
If Labor Day were a gift-giving occasion, this biography of Joe Hill by freelance writer Adler (Mollie’s Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line, 2000, etc.) would top this year’s holiday list. As the author notes, the man who was executed in 1915 for a murder he didn’t commit now seems “to float with Paul Bunyan and John Henry and Johnny Appleseed in a celestial realm somewhere between fiction and legend.” The Swedish immigrant was complicit in that mythmaking, insisting he defend himself against charges of killing a grocer (where there was no motive or evidence tying him to the scene), then offering little defense and finally demanding a new trial rather than settling for the pardon he might well have received (his thousands of advocates included President Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller). But somewhere during his incarceration, Hill decided that he was worth more to the labor movement dead than alive. He refused to explain the only evidence against him, a gunshot wound suffered on the night of the crime, most likely inflicted by a friend who had been engaged to a woman they both coveted; her letter explaining the details is one of the keys unearthed by the Adler’s five years of research. Hill’s story remains inextricably linked with that of the IWW—the International Workers of the World (or “Wobblies”)—notorious as America’s most radical union of the early 20th century. Not only did it embrace the foreign and unskilled, but rather than campaigning for better wages, it urged the abolishment of the wage system. Yet what ultimately distinguished the Wobblies was their celebration of “the power of song” in galvanizing a movement. While the Wobblies are a dim memory, and Hill has become better known through a song eulogizing him than any he wrote, he remains a seminal influence on musical activism from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger through Bob Dylan.
Stronger in research than storytelling, Adler reveals the man beneath the myth, detailing the life that spawned the legend.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59691-696-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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