A thoughtful study of an often overlooked figure in the American civil-rights movement, by a professor of history at Williams College and historiographer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Whitney Young made his most important contributions to the causes of integration and equal rights as the executive director of the National Urban League—a moderate organization when compared with Stokely Carmichaels SNCC, James Farmers CORE, or even the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as guided by Martin Luther King. Raised in Kentucky, Young was influenced greatly by his educator father, who shared Booker T. Washingtons conservative view of race relations. His subsequent educational and social-work experiences in St. Paul, Minn., Omaha, Neb., and at traditionally black Atlanta University ultimately led to Youngs appointment as the league's head. In this position, he walked a fine line between courting wealthy white interests, such as the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller families (the latter helped to fund his graduate studies at Harvard), and acting as a liaison between government and African-American communities in distress. For his high-level white contacts, which included presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, Young was often labeled an Uncle Tom and called 'Whitey Young' by more radical black detractors. In return, Young was not shy about publicly expressing his distaste for the likes of Carmichael, Harlem politician Adam Clayton Powell, and Malcolm X (though he maintained a private correspondence with the Black Muslim leader). To his credit, Dickerson doesn't write hagiography; he points out Young's naivetÇ in believing he could enter the upper echelons of political power despite his color, and Youngs support of LBJ's escalation of the Vietnam War because of the president's support for civil-rights initiatives—perhaps Young's greatest political miscalculation. What Dickerson's work lacks is a fuller exploration of Young's personal life. Militant Mediator is likely to rekindle interest in this influential civil-rights advocate. (34 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8131-2058-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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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