by Edythe Scott Bagley ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 27, 2012
In an intimate glimpse, Coretta steps out from her husband’s shadow.
A glowing portrait of Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow by her sister.
The daughters of a lumber hauler in Alabama’s Black Belt region who was constantly harassed by white employers for his enterprising ways, Coretta and Edythe Scott were both educated at the Lincoln School, a white-run missionary boarding school, and later Antioch College, in Ohio. Embracing the tradition of Christian service instilled by those establishments, Coretta attempted to student teach in the Yellow Springs, Ohio, public-school system in 1950, despite protests by white parents. However, Antioch did not support her, delivering a bitter lesson in the deeply entrenched discrimination that pervaded even the North. A gifted soprano, she attended New England Conservatory in Boston on scholarship, where she met the Georgia-born King, then was a doctoral divinity student at Boston University. Impressed by her long, straight hair and evident intelligence, King sensed she would make the perfect wife. At the time, Coretta began her career as a successful singer, and from King’s first pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, to his last at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Coretta performed intermittently on stage. In 1965, she used a Freedom Concert tour to spread the message for civil-rights change. She was also committed to the antiwar group Women Strike for Peace, which attracted surveillance by the FBI. The author speculates about Coretta’s influence on King’s ultimate resistance to the Vietnam War, writing that the couple “shared vigorous and robust conversation about the issues they faced.” Steely, cerebral and unemotional, Bagley’s portrait reveals a remarkable character forged by harsh reality and unimaginable trial.
In an intimate glimpse, Coretta steps out from her husband’s shadow.Pub Date: April 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1765-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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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...
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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