Celebrates with notes of grace and passion the courage of people who acted on the Declaration of Independence’s words about...
Thirteen heart-gladdening tales of love on the run in the time of slavery, assembled by award-winning journalist De Ramus.
Not that they all ended happily; many of the lovers will die in these pages. But this impressive debut collection awes us with its stories of slave-era couples, many black, some interracial, who defied mobs and hounds and bounty hunters and taboos to maintain their relationships. De Ramus scoured Civil War, historical society, and court records, unpublished memoirs, and the remembrances of runaway slave couples to gather these stories of abiding affection, and it is not hard to understand why they have endured. These men and women possess a sinewy, breathtaking faith in the success of such acts as hiding out in a sailor’s chest for a few days—easy to say, but rather difficult to thoroughly imagine, especially when you consider that the people in the trunks were upside-down much of the time—or sprinkling cayenne pepper on shoes to distract the trackers’ dogs, or posing in the capes and top hats of southern gents (if your skin color allowed), or riding as a fugitive on the night transport of the Underground Railroad. De Ramus, once a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has a bold voice, flowing with admiration and dramatic in its scene setting, that serves the stories well. The author supplements these energetic narratives with historical background on the Promised Land of Canada, which had its own prejudices against blacks, and the Underground Railroad, which also had its downside: “ . . . only a small band of citizens actually aided slaves, and not all of them welcomed blacks into their homes or even churches except in segregated ‘negro seats.’ ” Once escaped, De Ramus notes, these former slaves didn’t simply hide out, but often started schools and whole communities to aid freed blacks.
Celebrates with notes of grace and passion the courage of people who acted on the Declaration of Independence’s words about being created equal and pursuing happiness. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-8263-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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