The empowering words of an insightful American who has risen to a place in government where his actions can really make a...
An engaging memoir on what it means to be a black Muslim in American government.
Raised in the 1970s in Detroit and Minneapolis in a household where hard work and discipline were the rules, not the exception, Ellison's childhood was saturated with tales of the struggles his extended family had endured to achieve racial equality under the Jim Crow laws. He juggled being an upper-middle-class black Catholic youth on track to succeed despite the street gangs, unemployment and drug deals commonplace in Detroit. From these beginnings, Ellison created his own vision of a post–civil rights society, "a new inclusive perspective" of society for which he was willing to stand up and fight. His desire for a more balanced, kind and fair world corresponded with the views he found in the Quran, and Ellison quickly converted to Islam. As an activist, he recognized that the best way to create the changes he envisioned was to become an active member of government. "I understood that we could make a difference in our homes, and in our communities—but we also could make a difference in our country by participating in government instead of just criticizing it,” he writes. This led to his ongoing career in national politics, eventually giving rise to his election to Congress, the first black Muslim to hold such an office. With insights into the famous leaders who have influenced him, Ellison passionately details the concepts that still divide America and offers suggestions on how the country can move beyond the color of a person's skin or religious belief to create a nation of the people, for the people.
The empowering words of an insightful American who has risen to a place in government where his actions can really make a difference.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6687-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
SEEN & HEARD
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