An important work by an eyewitness to the events of the 20th century.
Personal history from a towering figure in U.S. historical circles and a key player in our current understanding of race in America.
“Born in 1915, I grew up in a racial climate that was stifling to my senses,” Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom, 2000) writes. Here the scholar explores the issue of race in America through his own experience. He recalls his parents' long-distance relationship, necessitated by poverty (few people wanted to hire his father, a black lawyer, for fear of losing the jury's sympathy), his college days at Fisk, the failure of his first proposal to the woman who became his wife and his son's first words. He offers a staggering list of professional successes, achieved through a combination of high intelligence, relentless drive and a strong sense of social responsibility. (The reader will search in vain for any other secrets to his success.) Franklin decided early on that he wanted to reach the pinnacle of scholarship. He secured a Ph.D. from Harvard (at age 26, no less), broke the color barrier as a tenure-track professor at multiple institutions, consulted with Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education and served on the Fulbright board, heading President Clinton's Initiative on Race. Among the stories of prejudice Franklin recalls is the time he attempted to serve in World War II, only to be told that, while there was a desperate need for soldiers, the policy was to limit blacks to menial positions. Says Franklin: “During my life it has been necessary to work not only as hard as my energies would permit, but to do it as regularly and as consistently as humanly possible.”
An important work by an eyewitness to the events of the 20th century.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-29944-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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