Gracelessly written, but indispensable to students of Ellison, Oklahoma City in the 1920s, or Harlem in the ’40s.
Painstaking biography covering the first half of the noted African-American writer’s life, through his acceptance of the National Book Award in 1953.
Ellison (1914–94) grew up in Oklahoma City. His beloved father died when Ralph was three; thereafter he shuttled from address to address with his mother, whose ferocious self-respect made both employment and housing opportunities precarious. The intelligent boy’s struggles with poverty and racial strife were mitigated by exposure to a good library, a visionary music teacher, and exceptional local jazz. Later, he won a scholarship from Tuskegee Institute's prestigious music school to study trumpet and conducting. The need for money led him in 1936 to New York, where he was introduced to Langston Hughes and within weeks had shifted his orientation to literature and left-wing politics. With Hughes as his mentor, Ellison launched himself in literary and political circles both up- and downtown. He served as editor of The Negro Quarterly and consolidated his reputation as a critic with his advocacy of Richard Wright's Native Son. Jackson (English/Howard Univ.) illuminates the complicated ways in which Ellison's career was shaped by his relationship with Wright, with whom he shared a rural background, modernist tastes, and an ambivalent relationship with the Communist Party, and whose success spurred Ellison's desire to write fiction. After WWII, his second wife Fanny's income and companionship allowed him to concentrate on the protean novel that eventually became Invisible Man, the masterpiece that catapulted him to fame in 1952. Jackson's scholarship is thorough, his insights valuable, but his prose, marred by idiomatic blunders and muddy sentence structure, is only just adequate to convey the complex temperament of his subject. Ambitious, original, dedicated, and lucky, Ellison seems at once isolated from and excessively dependent on his professional milieu; despite the biographer’s emphasis on effort and integrity rewarded, sadness and desperation haunt this life.
Gracelessly written, but indispensable to students of Ellison, Oklahoma City in the 1920s, or Harlem in the ’40s.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-35414-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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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