A provocative but occasionally egotistical book.
Attorney Rice revisits her past and the career achievements that made her a top civil-rights litigator.
The daughter of educated and socially ambitious middle-class parents, the author took an early interest in defending the less fortunate. She also understood that her “cocktail lineage” put her in a special and to some degree privileged position with respect to other African-Americans. While many dark-skinned people “threatened white existence,” Rice’s lighter skin allowed her to live a sheltered life in a mostly white world. Determined to make a difference in the world, like her heroine, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Rice attended Harvard University and then NYU law school, where she would learn “the skills needed to bend the powerful.” Her first foray into the legal realm was as a law clerk with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) in New York City, where she worked to exonerate death-row inmates in Georgia. As a full-fledged lawyer at the LDF’s Los Angeles office, she plunged headfirst into L.A.’s gang underworld and became notorious as the gadfly of a brutally corrupt LAPD. Her work on behalf of the poor and dispossessed also led her to champion the building of new schools in an ineffective, overcrowded L.A. public-school system. Parts of the narrative—e.g., her recounting of her bare-knuckled interactions with inner-city gangs and a dysfunctional LAPD—are genuinely compelling. However, the author’s irritating tendency toward self-congratulation detracts from her genuinely inspiring, passionate story.
A provocative but occasionally egotistical book.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7500-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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