Enriching, deeply personal history.
A sweeping look at nearly 200 years on a Southern plantation, told by a descendant of the slaves who lived there.
Historian Baker explains that his 30-year project documenting Wessyngton Plantation in northwest Tennessee began in the 1970s. Intrigued by an 1891 photograph in his seventh-grade social-studies textbook of four well-dressed, dignified African-Americans, he soon discovered that two of the former slaves in the picture were his great-great-grandparents. They had lived at Wessyngton, a huge plantation that in its heyday spanned thousands of acres and was a major producer of tobacco and other crops, all harvested by a slave labor force that included the author’s relatives. That revelation spurred Baker to interview former Wessyngton inhabitants and dig through massive records kept by the plantation’s owners, now in the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville. The result is not only an exhaustive, meticulous history of Baker’s family—his one-on-one interviews with elderly family members are particularly vivid and revealing—but also a portrait of what it was like to be a slave, and a former slave, in the pre– and post–Civil War South. One fascinating section reveals how Wessyngton slaves found opportunities to worship together despite the ban on congregating in large numbers (slaveowners feared rebellion). The songs they sang while toiling in the fields communicated the secret locations where that night’s service would be held. Baker also learned that one of his distant relatives was probably a white slaveowner, and that his great-great-grandfather was among the many slaves who ran away with the Union Army. The sheer amount of detail here can be daunting, but it is always riveting, and the importance of Baker’s research can’t be overstated. As one of his interviewees put it, “Our people need to know what all those people went through back then for us to get where we are now, especially the young folks.”
Enriching, deeply personal history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6740-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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