A thought-provoking examination of the millennial black experience in the first decade of the 21st century.
Race and identity loom large in Harris’ highly personal and equally cerebral retrospective of his early days treading the streets of Brooklyn.
Even today, “Clinton Hill,” to many, sounds like a lot better place to live than “Bed-Stuy.” So much so that when the author was pitched a place to live in New York City in the early 2000s, the latter was actually disguised and passed off as the former. Regardless, the brutal reality of adulthood and Bed-Stuy would soon be impressed on the conflicted Midwestern transplant hoping to make it as a filmmaker and critic in the city. In Bed-Stuy and its surrounding environs, Harris navigated the thorny landscape of racial relations and worked hard to make ends meet. In addition to his personal story, he also explores the struggles and similar experiences of local luminaries, including Jay-Z, who went from unknown drug dealer to international superstar and business mogul. In the example of Jay-Z, Harris sees his own struggles as a young black man trying to square with the American dream and dealing with the nation’s systemic racism. President Barack Obama, who was trying to make it in Brooklyn during the mid-1980s, is also a source of serious contemplation about the ability and/or necessity of black Americans to code shift within certain sectors of society. The author’s ambivalence is painfully demonstrated in strained relationships with his roommate and, later, his girlfriend, both white. As he writes about his roommate, “I would go weeks without talking to him, preferring solitude when I could find it in a loft in which you heard everything the other was doing regardless of the drywall.” Traversing America's "double consciousness" is tough going, especially when you’re just out of college and trying to earn enough for recreational marijuana and exorbitant Brooklyn rents.
A thought-provoking examination of the millennial black experience in the first decade of the 21st century.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241564-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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