Greer’s mellifluous work should introduce her to new readers.
A lyrical, mannered memoir in which the American-British playwright and novelist returns to the South Side of Chicago, where she grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in a poor, segregated neighborhood.
Most of Greer’s work (Langston Hughes: the Value of Contradiction, 2011, etc.) was produced after her move to England in 1986 and thus is not well-known on this side of the Atlantic. In her beautifully wrought yet occasionally meandering narrative, the author taps back into the poor, hardworking spirit of her parents, very much the products of the Great Migration from the South after the turn of the century, and the rampant and stifling discrimination that also prevailed in Chicago as she grew up. She writes poignantly of her factory-worker father, who was raised in Jim Crow Mississippi only to endure the added humiliation of serving in the Army during World War II when German prisoners of war were treated better than black servicemen; and her light-skinned mother, self-described as “a little piece of leather that’s well put together,” who became a housewife and bore seven children—Greer being the eldest. They were working poor, able to attend Catholic school and move to a house of their own on the South Side. Observing her beautiful mother exhausted and restricted to the home gave Greer a good idea of what she did not want to do with her life. She tried studying law and was always writing, but she did not have the confidence to assert herself during the tumultuous period of her university years in Chicago, when Black Power was gathering strength. She had affairs with professors and white men and found a family among a welcoming gay community she calls “the Boys.” She ends with her move to New York City at age 30.
Greer’s mellifluous work should introduce her to new readers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1909807624
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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