Soul-baring revelations acknowledge racism’s impact, but make no excuses for the author’s mistakes.
Debut memoir by an African-American whose youthful dedication to antiracist activism degenerated into criminal behavior and led to jail.
Hopkins literally wrote his way out of the Virginia State Penitentiary with articles for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and other publications. He makes it clear that his activism did not arise from direct personal experience of oppression; among the black families in the factory town of Danville, Va., his was middle-class and comfortable. Nonetheless, his penetrating recollections reveal, racism had a cumulative effect as the civil rights movement ratcheted up. For example, after being transferred to a new school under the federal minority busing mandate, he was relieved to discover that white kids were not innately superior: black students in the forefront of integration “lived with the subconscious fear that the lies of racial inferiority might indeed, in some small and unknown way, be damnably true.” His confrontations with prejudice were oblique but infuriating, as when he realized that whites often addressed him and his father as if they were the same age. In his early teens, Hopkins became involved with the Black Panther Party. Unfulfilled and infected with rage, he was later talked into committing an armed robbery—and he got caught. No one was killed or even injured, but the jury gave him a life sentence. In prison, consenting to read a poem he had written for an inmate group session, Hopkins was applauded for the first time in his life. He adopted writing as his “escape” methodology, even though another con warned that the example of fellow jailhouse author Jack Henry Abbott (who killed again after being sprung due to the efforts of Norman Mailer) would make this a difficult path out of prison. Freed 17 years later, Hopkins found that “love for a world of readers I continued to believe in” had finally conquered his rage.
Soul-baring revelations acknowledge racism’s impact, but make no excuses for the author’s mistakes.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4623-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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