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DREAMING ME

Name: DREAMING ME
Author: Jan Willis
ISBN: 1-57322-173-2

AN AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMAN’S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

by Jan Willis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2001

A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism—but remains too intensely subjective throughout to...

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An intensely felt but highly personal account by an African-American academic of the journey she took from Christianity to Tibetan Buddhism—and back.

Raised in the 1950s in Docena, a small Alabama mining town, Willis attended segregated schools and was an outstanding student. While still in high school in Birmingham, she faced down Bull Connor’s attack dogs; later, at Cornell, she became involved in radical politics. Acutely aware of racial injustice and angry at white intimidation—the Klan once burned a cross outside the family home one evening while her father was working the graveyard shift in the mine—she had to decide, after graduating from Cornell in 1969, between joining the Black Panthers or studying Buddhism in Nepal. Although she felt it was her responsibility as a “thinking Black person” to join the radical group, her inner self rebelled and she went instead to Nepal (which she had visited the previous year while learning Sanskrit in India). In Nepal, studying Buddhism with a wise and perceptive Lama, she began to find herself at peace and better able to confront the stings of racism. When the Lama told here that living with pride and humility in equal proportions was very difficult, she understood at once that he had identified “one of the deepest issues confronting not only her, but all African Americans.” Back in the US she began teaching, got a Ph.D., and was granted tenure at Wesleyan (where she still teaches). Raised a Baptist, she has returned to her childhood faith and now calls herself a “Baptist-Buddhist.” Although she describes her parents with affection, the heart of her story is the account of her transforming encounter with Buddhism, which enabled her to overcome racism and practice the loving-kindness that Christianity demands.

A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism—but remains too intensely subjective throughout to rise above the level of personal memoir.

Pub Date: April 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-57322-173-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001

Categories:

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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)