After discovering W.C. Pennington’s 1849 autobiography, minister and prolific author Webber (editor: An American Prayer...
A richly detailed, wide-ranging biography of a modestly neglected black religious leader who was born a slave.
After discovering W.C. Pennington’s 1849 autobiography, minister and prolific author Webber (editor: An American Prayer Book, 2008, etc.) delved into the archives to learn about this pre–Civil War preacher, educator and abolitionist. Pennington fled north at the age of 19. Illiterate and so ignorant he had never heard of the Underground Railroad, he encountered it after reaching the North. Sympathetic members provided shelter and introduced him to both education and Christianity, which he embraced enthusiastically. Within five years, he was teaching, preaching and participating in the earliest national black-activist organizations. Despite his energy, Pennington lacked the quirks and charisma of contemporaries such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Fortunately, he lived in interesting times, so readers will encounter the familiar, turbulent, but ultimately successful fight for abolition along with the discouraging, far less successful struggle for black civil rights in the North. By 1860, only six northern states permitted blacks to vote; none could serve on juries. Pennington was regularly refused service in restaurants, forced to ride baggage cars on trains, refused admittance or thrown off trams and directed to the “colored section” when attending white churches—even those whose ministers supported abolition. His protests mostly involved speeches, sermons and essays, which readers may prefer to skim; efforts at legal or political action failed as often as they succeeded.Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60598-175-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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