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SON OF THE ROUGH SOUTH

AN UNCIVIL MEMOIR

The author’s talents as a historian far outweigh his abilities as an autobiographer.

A long-time Newsweek journalist piggybacks his life’s story onto the most important news event of his career: the turbulent drama of the civil rights movement.

Unfortunately, though, Fleming’s brilliance as a journalist is strangely at odds with his weakness as a memoirist. Clearly more comfortable recalling the violence of the struggle for racial equality, he offers vibrant portraits of the most harrowing incidents of that era, including the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, the investigation into the disappearance of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., and the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. These sections stand out with sharp observations of body language, vocal inflections, political maneuvering, street theater and the steely determination of both civil rights agitators and segregationist status quo enforcers to plant their politics on the landscape. Strangely, though, Fleming’s attempt to tell his personal story is less compelling. Born in 1927 in North Carolina, raised for most of his childhood in a Methodist orphanage (even though his mother was still alive and healthy), he escaped poverty and isolation through a late-teens stint in the Navy and then became a reporter. Yet he fails to enrich the account of his own life with the kind of revealing detail he brings to his historic coverage. The two stories that brought him his greatest national exposure, as the victim of a vicious assault during the 1966 Watts riots and one of those fooled by the D.B. Cooper hoax, are presented in an antiseptic and detached manner. His narrative of the post-Newsweek years sweeps along in an elusive rush lacking emotion and specificity; he casually, almost accidentally, drops in an account of being hospitalized and treated with electroshock therapy. It would seem the story of Fleming’s life is the dramatic news events he covered, not the life itself.

The author’s talents as a historian far outweigh his abilities as an autobiographer.

Pub Date: May 10, 2005

ISBN: 1-58648-296-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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