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ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY

Name: ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY
Author: Francis Bok
ISBN: 0-312-30623-7

THE TRUE STORY OF MY TEN YEARS IN CAPTIVITY--AND MY JOURNEY TO FREEDOM IN AMERICA

by Francis Bok with Edward Tivnan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2003

Halting, traumatized account of cruelty and suffering.

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A harrowing memoir in the gothic, almost surreal setting of what some Africans do to other Africans.

Born to what he recalls as a blissful, unschooled childhood in southern Sudan, Piol Bol Buk (his Dinka name) was seven in 1986 when he made his first trip alone from his tribal village to the local marketplace. It was his last. For centuries, even, as the author claims, before there was Islam, Arabic people in the vast country’s north have claimed and exercised the right to raid the black settlements to the south for booty, cattle, and human chattel. Kidnapped into slavery by an Arab militiaman as the family goatherd, Bok spends his first traumatized weeks almost in a trance, sleeping on the ground in a crude hut, barely able to eat (the usual fare: meat gone bad). Crying, complaining, and recalcitrant behavior are corrected by swift beatings. Promoted to cowherd by age 12, he twice attempts to escape and is ultimately recaptured and told he will be shot in the morning. His master relents—“He needed me too much,” Bok recalls—but finally, after ten full years of captivity, he gets away. The accrued psychological trials are tortuous: learn Arabic to survive; after escaping, relearn Dinka and try to locate the parents you haven’t heard of in a decade. Unable to find word of his parents and in constant fear of informants who at one point label him an opponent of the government, Bok makes his way to Cairo and eventually, through the UN refugee program, to the US. He is the first escaped slave to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a practice that, overlaid by Africa’s longest running civil war and the indifference of a now Islamist government (some Dinka are Christian), persists, unbelievably, to this day.

Halting, traumatized account of cruelty and suffering.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-312-30623-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

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...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)