A feel-good narrative that underscores the brutal effects of poverty at home and injustice abroad.
Unusual split memoir of the intertwined lives of a reformed drug dealer and a misfit turned Africa diplomat.
In alternating chapters, Prendergast (co-author: The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa’s Worst Human Rights Crimes, 2010) and Mattocks describe the bond that began many years ago, when Prendergast started an informal “Big Brother” relationship with Mattocks when he was seven years old and homeless. Prendergast depicts his own adolescence as deeply unhappy. Scarred by acne and familial estrangement, he retreated into athletics and fantasies of becoming a “do-gooder.” He’d already discovered a preoccupation with Africa, specifically the suffering which the West ignored, that would eventually lead to his life’s work, but also impulsively befriended Michael and his younger brother, James, while visiting a Washington D.C., shelter in 1983: “These boys had nothing and yet radiated with life and sunshine.” Over time, Prendergast provided a vital emotional lifeline to the Mattocks boys while trying to assuage his interest in Africa, moving from internship to lobbying on behalf of a small philanthropy, Bread for the World, and visiting the continent’s trouble spots. Eventually, the author’ss dedication to this lonely cause led him to the Clinton White House, where he was Director for African Affairs at the NSC, and to involvement with celebrities like Don Cheadle and Angelina Jolie. The chapters that capture Mattocks’ perspective are written in an unadorned, colloquial style that is nonetheless effective in capturing the forgotten realities of black urban America during the ’80s, when gun violence and crack hellishly transformed daily life in places like D.C. Mattocks’ depiction of his and James’ gradual immersion in the drug trade is chilling, and he considers himself fortunate to have escaped, but also acknowledges that Prendergast’s mentoring made a crucial difference: “Even though my dad left, we had J.P…. he cared about us in a way even my mom and my aunts didn’t know how to.”
A feel-good narrative that underscores the brutal effects of poverty at home and injustice abroad.Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-46484-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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