An admiring celebration of one woman’s important contribution to an ongoing struggle.
A detailed biography of a once-prominent civil rights activist.
In the 1960s, Gloria Richardson (b. 1922) was at the forefront of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee, which targeted racial injustice in Cambridge, Maryland. Drawing on interviews with Richardson over many years, nearly 40 interviews with other activists, and a prodigious number of books and articles, Fitzgerald (History and Political Science/Cabrini Univ.) makes his literary debut with this thoroughly researched biography. Having Richardson’s cooperation proves to be both a boon and liability. She “shared her voice” as well as “many intimate details of her life and how she views the world,” but the author’s affection for her sometimes clouds the narrative. The daughter of a prominent Cambridge family, Richardson was taught “self-respect, respect for family, and respect for and service to her black community.” Undergraduate studies at Howard University grounded her in sociology, political science, and “research methods and group-management skills.” In 1962, Cambridge’s first civil rights demonstration, led by black students, included Richardson’s high school–age daughter. Soon Richardson was asked to lead the CNAC as it evolved from supporting the students to carrying out its own goals, coordinating with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to focus on voting and school desegregation. Richardson, a feisty, outspoken reformer, rejected “the politics of respectability” that had characterized protest movements of the 1950s; clashes with police, arrests, and angry demonstrations were inevitable. “Threats of violence, including murder, against CNAC members and their supporters were common,” Fitzgerald reports. Media coverage elevated Richardson to the national stage. When the Kennedy administration decided to become involved in Cambridge’s racial problems, Richardson at first felt “a sense of optimism” that, unfortunately, was short-lived. A meeting with Robert Kennedy, she remarked, seemed like an empty ritual. For the next several years, Richardson was a strong and influential voice that, the author asserts, “helped Black Power percolate” and expand.
An admiring celebration of one woman’s important contribution to an ongoing struggle.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8131-7649-9
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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