Personal and interesting, though the hesitancy and complacency of Reverend Marsh and the good citizens of Laurel are less...
Reminiscences of growing up white and middle-class in the Deep South during the late 1960s.
Marsh (Religion/Univ. of Virginia; God’s Long Summer, not reviewed) details his experiences as an adolescent with disarming candor and wit. In 1967, his father, the Reverend Bob Marsh, accepted a post at the First Baptist Church of Laurel, Mississippi, unaware that he was sailing into a maelstrom. The Marsh family arrived in a community deeply divided along racial lines. However, in an effort to avoid antagonizing his congregation, Reverend Marsh initially chose to avoid speaking out on the issue, rationalizing his decision with the claim that segregation was a matter of “politics,” and not an appropriate topic for the pulpit. Living and working in one of the most prominent FBI-KKK battlegrounds of the late 1960s made this stance increasingly uncomfortable for the pious minister, and his internal conflict began to spill over both at home and in church. He briefly considered leaving the pulpit to teach, until a series of events combined to encourage the reverend to change his tune. The remainder of the text details the town’s efforts to comply with the federally mandated desegregation of its public schools; the author offers humorous, touching anecdotes describing his own experiences and interactions with his new classmates. While anticlimactic, the ending is realistic and evokes considerable sympathy for the difficulties white Mississippians had to face when their long-held perceptions of reality were overruled by national popular opinion.
Personal and interesting, though the hesitancy and complacency of Reverend Marsh and the good citizens of Laurel are less than inspiring.Pub Date: March 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-04418-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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