A short, readable biography that sticks to King's public career and legacy. Fairclough, (History/Univ. of Wales, Lampeter; To Redeem the Soul of America, 1987) synthesizes material from the rich lode of King scholarship. He describes King's intellectual formation at Morehouse College and Crozer Theological Seminary, his public emergence during the 195556 Montgomery bus boycott, and his subsequent surge to civil rights leadership. The author explores King's philosophy of nonviolence, contrasting his nonpartisan reformism with the ideas of older black leaders like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, whose leftist sympathies made them victims of anticommunist fervor. Fairclough analyzes King's historic speech during the 1963 March on Washington, noting his use of ``hallowed symbols of Americanism'' to frame his call for social change. When King moved his protests north to cities like Chicago, he recognized that his incremental political victories had little effect on black poverty; in 1966 he began a more radical critique of American society, and the Vietnam War. Fairclough stumbles a few times. He states that allegations about King's sexual promiscuity ``are still confined to the realm of innuendo''; King colleague Ralph Abernathy's recent memoir supplies stronger evidence. Also, the author, commenting on Malcolm X, states that ``the earlier, angrier Malcolm...would be remembered and revered''; Malcolm's image is now under more subtle scrutiny. But Fairclough offers a savvy summary on King's legacy. Annual King Day celebrations, he writes, ``are too often tedious and empty rituals,'' and the ``I Have a Dream'' speech glosses over King's radicalism and militancy. While the author acknowledges that King was no original thinker, he believes that King's genius was his public speaking, his ``religious enthusiasm and moral certainty.'' And while some observers think King could not have staved off the decline of the civil rights movement, the author suggests that his leadership might indeed have achieved more. A good introduction for those too busy to read the more monumental King biographies.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8203-1690-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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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