Amid the current concerns over global labor exploitation, this is a timely, unromanticized reminder that human suffering has...
A stimulating biography of the pugnacious labor organizer that sheds light on radical movements while questioning the myth-making machine that surrounds great figures.
Gorn (The Manly Art, not reviewed) tells the story of two women: Mary Harris Jones and her nom de guerre, Mother Jones. Digging deep into news archives, journals, census files, and other sources, he finds truths about the life of the former that have been obscured by the self-created myth of the latter. Mary Harris was born in Ireland during the summer of 1837; Mother Jones claimed May Day, 1830, as her natal date. After emigrating to America, Mary Harris Jones lost her four children (and her husband) to yellow fever in 1867; Mother Jones proclaimed herself a mother to all workers. Through this juxtaposition, the reader sees what is, despite some unfulfilled promise and a fair share of lost battles, an American success story. An immigrant, a woman, an elderly widow, and a worker, she made her voice heard throughout her adopted land by dint of “nothing but courage, compassion and commitment,” Gorn writes. Yet her legacy has been “blunted,” he asserts, along with “memories of America’s radical tradition.” Once an “apostle of working-class militance,” since her death in 1930 Mother Jones has been sanitized into a benevolent matriarch. Gorn never offers an entirely satisfactory answer to the question of how and why a middle-aged, widowed seamstress made her way onto labor’s center stage at the end of the 19th century. He settles on cumulative experience as the key, arguing that personal tragedy and early exposure to radical thinking, combined with nearly half a century of witnessing poor people’s struggles, “energized the life of Mother Jones.”
Amid the current concerns over global labor exploitation, this is a timely, unromanticized reminder that human suffering has accompanied industrial change in the past, and that people fought to ameliorate it.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8090-7093-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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