A fluent and fluid memoir of growing up way down south, from Boston Globe reporter Wilkie.
As a poor white youth in 1940s and ’50s Mississippi, as a college student at Ole Miss, and later still as a newspaperman with the Clarksdale Press Register, Wilkie was witness to an era of extraordinary change in the American South. When he was a kid, bigotry was the way of life—African-Americans were “mud people,” Jews were “Babylonian Talmudists”—and Southerners held jealously to their culture, accent, music, and food. Widely stereotyped as a baroque lot living “as spiritual citizens of a nation that existed for only four years in another century” (and whose cult figures were a parade of eccentrics from Elvis to Bear Bryant), the federal government was about to give them a rude awakening via laws of desegregation. Wilkie lived through the thick of it—the rise of the Citizens Councils and the Klan, the coming of James Meredith, the sit-ins at Greensboro, the Freedom Riders—and he charts here how the sense of fairness inculcated in him by his mother evolved into an understanding of the injustice of segregation. Like many teenagers, he wanted to be a rebel, and it began to dawn on him that the true rebels were sitting at Woolworth lunch counters waiting vainly to be served. By the time Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, Wilkie had witnessed enough and he fled north. He offers a beautifully nuanced reading of the Carter presidency, trumped up for its Southern roots, its decency, and its honor. When the Globe returned Wilkie to the South to cover the place like a foreign country for readers in that chilly northern town, he immediately sensed that major changes (in both mindset and demographics) had taken place since he left—changes that have been unfortunately obscured by the recent brouhaha over the Mississippi state flag.
Wilkie is a savvy reporter, combining grace with tack-sharpness in this memorable portrait of a slice of the South over the past half-century.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87285-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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