A bit like an overlong home movie.
Adoring biography of a pioneering African-American businessman from his niece and grandniece.
Birmingham, Alabama, was a tough city to grow up in if you were a young black man in the early 1900s, but according to former TV anchorwoman Jenkins and her daughter Hines, A.G. Gaston managed to thrive during the majority of his 103 years there. He made it through tenth grade, worked at a variety of difficult jobs, including a stint in the iron mines, then served in WWI. Back home he found “few opportunities and ample disdain,” until opening his lunchbox one day in the mine prompted a business epiphany. His mother’s fried chicken was so good that fellow workers clamored to share it, so Gaston started a little lunch business. The authors go on to extol their forebear’s business acumen, noting that while some might label him an opportunist, he always remained true to his dictum: “find a need and fill it.” (Throughout, Jenkins and Hines pour out Gaston’s rules for success and homespun wisdom like ketchup on fries.) African-American community needs in Birmingham were certainly many, and few were being filled until Gaston came along. An indefatigable saver of his modest income, he started a small lending practice (charging 25 percent interest), then a funeral-insurance agency. During the Depression he bought script at 50 percent of its face value and started a motel and restaurant, amassing a sizable fortune. Civil-rights activists knew they could turn to Gaston when they needed money or a liaison with the white community. He was more like Booker T. Washington than Martin Luther King, more National Negro Business League than NAACP, but in tumultuous civil-rights-era Birmingham that was enough to get his house firebombed. His descendants’ loving portrait reveals the pivotal, if milder, role black business leaders played in the struggle for racial justice, but familial minutia blurs Gaston rather than adding to his focus.
A bit like an overlong home movie.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45347-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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