A giddily conversational account of finding racial peace within.
Thin-on-ideas memoir by an African-American journalist who grew up in Milwaukee but discovered her authentic black self through her experiences in Spain.
An upper-middle-class suburban Midwesterner, Tharps was accused in school of “talking White” and not “acting like a real Black person was supposed to.” Though she was popular and made friends easily, she was keenly aware of slurs and latent prejudice. By seventh grade, Tharps was sure Spain was going to be her salvation. “I wasn’t just studying Spanish because I had to learn a language,” she writes. “I wanted access into another world when this one got to be too much.” Yet when she followed her sister into American Field Service (AFS), an exchange program that allowed her to spend a summer abroad, she opted to explore her African roots in Casablanca. (Apparently no one told her Moroccans are Arabs.) Elitist Smith College was another odd choice for finding her “Blacker side”; ignored at the first meeting of the Black Students’ Alliance, she left in tears. Resolved to become a “multiculturalist,” Tharps finally got to Spain for her junior year abroad in Salamanca, where she was referred to as la morena and received numerous marriage proposals. After a series of goofy, unsuitable Spanish boyfriends, she met Manuel in a German class; he visited her in Milwaukee, and they later got married. Tharps embarked on a career as a journalist and moved to New York; she and Manuel had two sons. Her memoir records moments of harassment while traveling into Spain wearing dreadlocks (“a big black moving target”) and her troubling visit to Manuel’s birthplace, Cádiz, which in the days of the Atlantic trade had been a transfer point for slaves, some of whom remained in bondage in Andalusia. Though Tharps comes to recognize how her own cultural identity (“Kinky”) intersects with the Spanish (“Gazpacho”), the journey she chronicles isn’t exactly heavy on intellectual insights.
A giddily conversational account of finding racial peace within.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9647-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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