Indefatigable research and lucid prose combine to produce a book whose importance cannot be overstated. (16 halftones, not...
Rigorously researched and creatively imagined biography of an African-American who fought in the American Revolution, amassed a small fortune, and fought slavery and racial discrimination.
Rediscovering the life of the once-prominent Forten, largely unknown today, Winch (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston) has achieved something quite profound and affecting. Born in the fall of 1766, his name later changed from the common slave name “Fortune,” he was a fortunate child in some ways. His grandfather had somehow achieved liberation from slavery, so James Forten was a free man from birth. He followed his father into the sail-making trade and, after serving on a privateer, enduring seven months of captivity aboard a prison hulk, and living briefly in London, he returned as an apprentice to the sail loft where his father had labored. Winch’s prodigious research is evident in the detail she supplies about 18th-century sail-making. Here, as elsewhere, when documentation is missing, she has recreated her subject’s world so thoroughly that we know what he must have been doing. After 13 years, Forten took over the business. Noted for his probity as well as his enormous skill, he thrived; blacks and whites worked alongside one another with efficiency, if not affection. Forten soon began to diversify, purchasing real estate and lending money. Winch follows his financial career and chronicles his increasing activism in civic, educational, and religious affairs. He administered his local church, helped create black schools, wrote piercing essays, and spoke eloquently against the “voluntary” emigration of blacks to Liberia, though for a time he favored the genuinely voluntary resettlements in Haiti. Friends and colleagues included the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and Forten died one of the most respected men in Philadelphia. In 1842, thousands of black and white mourners attended his funeral or watched its solemn progression.
Indefatigable research and lucid prose combine to produce a book whose importance cannot be overstated. (16 halftones, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-508691-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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