A meticulous, absorbing reconstruction of the life of the ``Messenger of Allah'' who led the Nation of Islam for more than four decades, until his death in 1975. Clegg (History/North Carolina A&T State Univ.) has crafted a careful portrait of the enigmatic Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole), a man revered by some as a divinely appointed messenger and derided by others as a black supremacist hate-monger (promulgating a chauvinist ``white-devil'' racial theory). Clegg maneuvers skillfully between these extremes to delineate the complexities of the leader's historical world while still offering a subtle critique of the more disturbing ideologies of the Nation, especially its propensities for violence and avaricious acquisition. This first full-length scholarly biography of Elijah Muhammad benefits greatly from interviews with the leader's family and from recently declassified FBI files on the Nation. J. Edgar Hoover's relentless pursuit of the ``Black Muslims'' included tapping Elijah Muhammad's phone at his Phoenix retreat, infiltrating the Nation with undercover officers, and following its leader at all times. The records of this surveillance, especially the phone tapping, reveal a complex and somewhat duplicitous Elijah Muhammad—reassuring Malcolm X of his secure role in the movement and then urging another follower to ``close Malcolm's eyes and chop off his head.'' Clegg also details the controversies surrounding Elijah Muhammad's extramarital affairs with at least eight women, by whom he sired more than a dozen children. What Clegg is perhaps less adept at demonstrating is why, despite all the scandals, Elijah Muhammad remained so beloved by his followers, who were aware of his indiscretions but overwhelmingly rallied to his support. In all, though, this is both an outstanding biography and an important contribution to the history of the Nation of Islam. (16 pages b&w photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15184-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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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