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EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW

Name: EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW
Author: Constance Baker Motley
ISBN: 0-374-14865-1

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by Constance Baker Motley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1998

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Unfortunately, the impact of an autobiographer’s writing style may not match that of his or her life. Insofar as that is the case here, however, it reflects Motley’s amazing career (she is now a senior judge in US District Court for the Southern District of New York) as much as her colorless prose. Motley became a lawyer at a time when neither women nor blacks were especially welcome in the profession, and she worked with the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund at the outset of the civil rights movement, including laboring alongside Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education. Her efforts in litigating civil rights cases included ten appearances before the Supreme Court. She briefly moved into politics and became the first black woman elected to the New York Senate and the first woman to serve as Manhattan borough president, then became the first woman appointed to the federal bench in New York. Indeed, the events themselves often carry the reader along; the drama of sitting on the speaker’s platform with her son during Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or tense moments on Mississippi roads with Medgar Evers matches that of any movie script. Tensions within the civil rights movement are also revealed when Motley discloses that she “thought he [Marshall] would have a stroke” when the advocate of moderate legal tactics learned of student sit-ins in 1960. She closes with a somewhat incongruous commentary regretting the dismantling of affirmative action and some uncharacteristically biting remarks about the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Motley considers Bush’s action “ . . . the most cynical move made in the area of race relations since Plessy” that “dealt all of us black Americans a crushing societal setback in exchange for conservative votes.” Not a great book in its own right, but certainly of interest for the student of the civil rights movement. (24 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: June 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-374-14865-1

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)