bookshelf

UP FROM SERFDOM

Name: UP FROM SERFDOM
Author: Aleksandr Nikitenko
ISBN: 0-300-08414-5

MY CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH IN RUSSIA, 1804-1824

by Aleksandr Nikitenko & translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

An uplifting saga that offers an engrossing eyewitness view of Russian history and makes a valuable contribution to slave...

bookshelf

The memoirs of a former serf from early-19th-century Russia who writes poignantly of his fight for freedom.

Nikitenko provides a touching and lively account of the vicissitudes of his boyhood. A bright and imaginative child who loved learning and nature, Nikitenko was nevertheless (along with his entire family and some 300,000 other serfs) the personal property of one Count Sheremetev, who had the legal authority to dispose of the boy according to his will. The author’s family was unusual in a number of ways, however. First of all, they were descended not from serfs but from free Cossacks who had fallen into bondage—and the ancestral memory of this disgrace served to keep them from accepting their fate. Secondly, they were not peasants. Nikitenko’s father, Vasily, had gone to school and worked as an estate clerk rather than a farmhand. Because his father valued learning so highly, the author was able to receive a rather exceptional education for someone from his circumstances. In spite of his abilities, however, he could not, as a serf, go on to high school—and his resulting bitterness nearly drove him to suicide. Although Nikitenko did manage (at 14) to become a schoolteacher, he never abandoned his dream of entering the university. Eventually he was helped by influential friends to buy his own freedom, and his narrative ends with a description of his 1824 manumission. He later enrolled in St. Petersburg University, eventually becoming a professor there as well as a government censor. In 1841 he finally achieved his family’s release from bondage.

An uplifting saga that offers an engrossing eyewitness view of Russian history and makes a valuable contribution to slave literature. (3 maps; 25 illustrations)

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-300-08414-5

Page Count: 220

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)