Less thorough than James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), but still of much interest to...
A slender but sturdy life of the centrifugal author at home in New York.
Baldwin was many things; consistent is not necessarily one of them. Boyd (Pound for Pound: A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, 2005) notes that Baldwin was “committed to black radicalism” and a fellow traveler of Malcolm X, yet not so committed to the cause as to endorse younger activists such as Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who returned the favor. We meet Cleaver as he and Baldwin were supposedly kissing at a 1967 dinner party in San Francisco, “a graphic contradiction of [Cleaver’s] merciless attack on Baldwin’s homosexuality, or an indication of his own deep-seated sexual ambivalence.” Baldwin advocated racial rapprochement, telling Harlem schoolchildren, “Color doesn’t matter. Color is a political reality which certain politicians use. There is no moral value to black or white skin.” Yet he excused his vigorous anti-Semitism by saying that nearly all blacks in Harlem, after all, hated Jews: “We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building.” Baldwin, writes Boyd, was a student of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and was active in the small literary circle that succeeded the movement. Yet where Cullen was concerned with community-building, Baldwin seems to have thrived on feuds, such as a long-running one with Langston Hughes and, calculated to fuel anti-Semitic sentiments, another fierce one with Norman Mailer. Boyd traces those conflicts to their roots, delivering a refined sort of literary gossip ennobled by substance: We hear, for instance, of Henry Louis Gates’s running argument with Baldwin over whether Harriet Beecher Stowe was a worthy writer, of Amiri Baraka’s dismissal of Baldwin for not being a sufficient revolutionary and so forth.
Less thorough than James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), but still of much interest to students of recent American letters.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9307-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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