A dark and disturbing read.
The one-time assistant chief of staff of the Black Panther Party recounts his metamorphosis from urban guerilla to urban planner.
Forbes, now the chief strategic officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation in New York, gives a vivid picture of the ethos of the black liberation movement and the alienation of black youth. He was first attracted to the Black Panthers when his older brother, a UCLA student, brought the party’s newspaper home with him to San Diego, where Forbes, a high-school drop-out, had felt the brunt of racial discrimination. In tune with its goal of ending police brutality, he joined the party at age 16 and was soon selling its newspaper on the street in the Bay Area. From there he moved up to the party’s ministry of information, and by age 20, he had become the party’s head of security, maintaining and distributing weapons. His personal choice was a 9-mm Browning automatic pistol, worn on an inside belt holster, but he also kept a riot shotgun and a Colt 45 close at hand. When his plan to kill a witness against Huey Newton went awry, leaving one Black Panther dead and Forbes wounded, he fled the Bay Area and went underground, living in various cities under various aliases. After some years as a fugitive, Forbes shed the persona of an angry, gun-toting police-hater and made the decision to turn his life around. Returning to California in 1980, he turned himself in, stood trial for felony murder and was convicted. Forbes used his time in prison to earn college credits; he was released in 1985. At 37, armed with a graduate degree, he took his first paying job as an adult. When writing of his life within the Black Panther Party and of his time behind bars, he uses black street jargon freely, lending this some added authenticity. An appendix provides a chronology of the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party.
A dark and disturbing read.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7434-8266-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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