A necessarily sketchy but worthwhile contribution to our understanding of black political history.
A black man runs for president…in 1904.
With a slave for a father, George Edwin Taylor (1857–1925) was born in Arkansas. Orphaned young, he came of age in La Crosse, Wis., where thanks to his foster family he received a classical education rich in language and oratory. He became a reporter, editor and publisher of newspapers that championed the causes of farmers and workingmen. From mentors like publisher “Brick” Pomeroy, a founder of the Greenback Party, and political insurgent Frank “White Beaver” Powell, Taylor learned and perfected the fiery language of populism. Following a series of third-party alliances, a move to Iowa and a brief flirtation with the Republicans, Taylor allied with the Democrats for more than a decade before emerging as the “standard-bearer of the National Negro Liberty Party.” Mouser (A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794, 2002, etc.) forthrightly concedes the difficulty of reconstructing Taylor’s life—no personal papers survive—and acknowledges that even periods of years go missing. We learn almost nothing about Taylor’s three wives or of the health issues that apparently plagued him. Receiving only 2,000 votes and getting crushed by Theodore Roosevelt in a presidential election normally wouldn’t warrant even the slight biographical sketch the author dutifully attempts, but Taylor’s work as a writer and activist commands our attention for two reasons. First, Barack Obama’s historic election has heightened interest in all his antecedents, however obscure. Second, Taylor’s career opens a window on the first stirrings of independent black politics. His uncommon background and training, his migration from farm/labor causes to race-centered issues and his peculiar place in the era’s black political firmament—caught between the eastern intellectual establishment led by W.E.B. Du Bois and the waning Southern school embodied by Booker T. Washington—all offer an unusual perspective on the larger story of an emerging consciousness that would came to fruition more than 100 years later.
A necessarily sketchy but worthwhile contribution to our understanding of black political history.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-299-24914-4
Page Count: 266
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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