An unsung hero of the civil rights movement takes center stage. Manis (Southern Civil Religions in Conflict, not reviewed), religion and southern studies editor at Mercer University Press in Macon, Ga., has written an exhaustive and compelling portrayal of Fred Shuttlesworth, the Birmingham minister who labored in the trenches for years, often risking his life for the greater good of all Alabama citizens. Shuttlesworth helped Martin Luther King with his Montgomery bus boycott and James Farmer with his freedom rides; he even supported sit-ins conducted by students on various southern college campuses in the 1960s. The group he founded, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), had been doing battle with Alabama authorities since the mid-1950s. But Shuttlesworth remained in the margins of the movement (and its histories) because of his brash style, his unpolished manner, and his strong, uncompromising will. Manis points out that King commanded the national stage while Shuttlesworth fought to integrate Birmingham’s buses, lunch counters, police force, and parks. Some of the book’s finest chapters examine the strategic battles and confrontations between Shuttlesworth and Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, which come to a bloody conclusion in 1963, when King’s forces finally join with the ACMHR after much prodding by Shuttlesworth. The author takes time out from the movement to cover his subject’s preaching and home life. The latter is more often than not depicted as stormy, but this helps humanize Shuttlesworth. A good read for those who think Martin Luther King Jr. carried off the civil rights revolution by himself, as well as for those who know better and seek more details about some of the other men and women involved. (24 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8173-0968-3
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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