A somewhat pedantic biography of a remarkable woman—author, journalist, socialist, feminist, and a founder of the NAACP. Despite her dry manner, Wedin (English/Univ. of Wisconsin, Whitewater) has thoroughly researched and recreated a life filled with drama. Ovington was born in 1865 in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in an abolitionist milieu, seized early on by an affinity for the Socialist Party and the working class, she also enjoyed a life of privilege and an education that led to the Annex, a college-level institution for women that was eventually renamed Radcliffe College. Ovington rejected the usual choices—marriage or domesticity with her parents—instead establishing a settlement house in Brooklyn; from there she moved to what was then a Negro neighborhood in Manhattan with plans for another settlement, beginning her dedication to the cause of black rights and opportunities, which engaged her until she died at age 86. For advice, she wrote to activist and author W.E.B. DuBois, beginning a friendship that was to last the rest of their lives. Race riots in Atlanta and Springfield, Ill., galvanized her to join with William English Walling, a southern white man, and Henry Moskowitz, a social worker, in launching the NAACP. She contacted her many black friends and acquaintances, and within five months, in May 1909, the fledging organization drew 1,500 people to its first public meeting. Ovington traveled, wrote, recruited, and organized among both blacks and whites for the next 40 years; she served as NAACP chairwoman for more than a decade. While she believed in educating blacks and whites about each other, she also advocated using the courts, the Congress, and grass-roots organizing to end racism. Overshadowed by others then and now, Ovington is revealed to be a courageous and politically astute woman, a ``torch-bearer,'' as Wedin calls her, against oppression and discrimination. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-471-16838-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
