Former Black Panther Party Chief-of-Staff Hilliard—responding to the 1989 death of his childhood friend and Panther founder Huey Newton—looks back at the Party and the world in which its members came of age. Growing up poor in racist Alabama, Hilliard—who, with the aid of Cole (Never Too Young to Die, 1988, etc.), writes his memoir in the present tense—absorbs the prevailing assumption that violence is the norm, but doesn't absorb his family's strong work ethic. Transplanted to Oakland, he becomes an alcohol-abusing teenage father who can't hold a job until the Panthers give him focus and stability. When Hilliard drunkenly shoots at a police car, Bobby Seale—soon to be bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom, and later to be acquitted on Connecticut murder charges—confirms the author's faith in the Panthers by rebuking his undisciplined behavior. As told here, Hilliard always seems more anxious to learn to use words and ideas than weapons; nonetheless, he eventually spends four years in prison on charges stemming from a 1968 Oakland shooting. (Hilliard reports that, over his protests and on Eldridge Cleaver's orders, Panthers had been cruising in search of a cop to kill.) With little Party support during his trial—and with Newton's paranoia apparently exacerbated by FBI dirty tricks- -Hilliard was expelled from the Panthers while incarcerated. Throughout the text, his memories are supplemented by sometimes overly general reminiscences from black and white associates, and by excerpted FBI materials. Hilliard now advocates AA's 12 Steps, and here he makes a ``fearless moral inventory'' of his early life, his post-Party downward spiral, and Newton's crack addiction. But his account of his Party years, while a valuable document, is less probing—and no substitute for fellow Panther Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power (p. 1288). (Photos—16 pp. b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-36415-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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