by Kevin Merida & Michael Fletcher ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2007
An unflinching look at success and race in America.
An engrossing biography of a conflicted man who, as the second African-American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, has become a hero to conservatives and a pariah to the black community at large.
Associate editor Merida and journalist Fletcher, both of the Washington Post, have done a superb job with this both harsh and sympathetic life of Clarence Thomas, best known for the battle over his confirmation 16 years ago, tinged not a little by the Anita Hill scandal. Drawing on many interviews with friends, colleagues and others (Thomas did not cooperate), the authors describe a sensitive dark-skinned Georgian who was raised by his beloved grandfather. Thomas attended parochial schools, Holy Cross and Yale Law, and he rose through Reagan-era federal posts to join the high court. In vivid scenes, the authors show how race defined Thomas: He was taunted in schoolyards for his blackness; wounded on hearing a white seminarian cry, “I hope the S.O.B. dies,” on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot; and embittered when he received no offers from major law firms upon graduating from Yale Law. (He keeps the rejection letters in a shoebox.) The authors note the irony of his opposition to affirmative action: He attended Holy Cross on a new scholarship for black students and entered law school under affirmative action. “Race is the central fact of his meteoric rise, and Thomas has alternately denied it and resented it—all the way to the top,” they write. He is presented as someone who could be charming, famously engaging people in long conversations. But what lingers is an image of an isolated loner.
An unflinching look at success and race in America.Pub Date: March 20, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-51080-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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