This slim, workmanlike account of Paul Robeson's early years becomes fascinating by dint of its subject's remarkable achievements. Brown, a longtime friend and collaborator of Robeson's (he was, among other things the coauthor of Robeson's book Here I Stand), writes with little embellishment about the life of one of our most impressive Americans. Robeson, born in 1898, was the son of Maria Louisa Bustill, an educated black woman from the North, and William Robeson, a runaway slave who eventually became a minister. Paul, the couple's youngest child, accumulated numerous honors in high school for his scholastic, debating, and athletic prowess, and won a prized scholarship to Rutgers University. There he again made high honors, was chosen best speaker in his class four years in a row, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, lettered in four sports, and twice won All-American status in football (at the same time playing semi-professional basketball with the prestigious St. Christopher social club team in Harlem). Upon his graduation, he was accepted into Columbia University Law School, from which he graduated successfully, though this time without academic honors. Perhaps that was because, while in law school, he was also playing professional football, making his Broadway acting debut, pursuing a successful singing career, touring England with a theatrical troupe, and getting married. Brown ends this brief book with Robeson just about to hit his stride as an actor and singer, and with the great controversies in his life still ahead of him. Given Robeson's amazing talents, it's hardly surprising that this often sounds more like a litany of his accomplishments than a biography. It's only in his afterword that Brown injects a more intimate note, offering some wonderful anecdotes about Robeson's personal life, as opposed to his public persona. (20 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8133-3178-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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