A moving story of a poor family's unforeseen contribution to the civil-rights struggle in America. News of the 1954 Brown decision ending segregated public schooling took its time reaching the Mississippi Delta, a backward area that a 19th-century traveler described as a ``lush, seething hell.'' In the fall of 1965, Mae Bertha Carter enrolled seven of her eight children in the hitherto all-white Drew, Miss., school system. As Carter tells legal scholar and debut author Curry, she was inspired by John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and the recently assassinated Medgar Evers. She expected to take heat for her actionafter all, she had not long before remarked to neighbors regarding civil-rights movement actions like the famous Greensboro, N.C., diner sit-in, ``Ain't none of that ever gonna happen in Mississippi or get to us out here on these plantations.'' She did not, however, expect the storm of controversy that descended on Drew in a swirl of freedom riders, Klansmen, attorneys, and reporters. That storm eventually broke and faded, and the seven Carter children not only graduated from Drew High School but also went on to receive college degrees; by a nice historical irony, one daughter, Beverly, later served on the Drew School Board. Curry tells the Carters' modest story well, giving the reader a solid feel for the tenor of small-town Mississippi life in an era that now seems eons awayand for how difficult the Carters' persistence was each day for the children. (One of them recalls, ``Up until a few years ago, I was still having nightmares about being in Drew High School, and I would wake up sobbing.'') A solid contribution to the literature of recent American political history. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56512-095-7
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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