A bold, sure-footed, significant biography of enormous depth and feeling.
A candid, corrective look at the Nation of Islam leader and renegade—and a deeply informed investigation of the evolution of his thinking on race and revolution.
For decades, distinguished scholar Marable (African-American Affairs/Columbia Univ.; Living Black History: How Re-Imagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future, 2006, etc.) studied the life and work of Malcolm X (1925–1965), and this meticulous sifting of the fact from the fiction expertly places him within the civil-rights movement of the time and as catalyst for the emerging Black Power struggle. The author looks beyond the myth that “Malcolmites” have woven around their leader and returns to original sources, such as NOI members and former members; Malcolm’s widow and their children; African and Islamist chiefs Malcolm met on his extensive travels abroad; civil-rights activists, who were wary of his views on racial separatism; and files by the FBI and New York Police Department, who may have been complicit in his assassination by NOI operatives on Feb. 21, 1965. First and foremost, Marable deconstructs Alex Haley’s masterly Autobiography of Malcolm X(1965), which he and Malcolm collaborated on for years before Malcolm’s death, but which exaggerates the exploits of Malcolm’s earlier manifestation as “Detroit Red,” probably in order to render more powerful the conversion to Islam of this hustler, pimp and thief incarcerated at the Norfolk Prison Colony. For years, Malcolm was NOI’s exalted evangelical front man and first minister, broadcasting the organization’s anti-white, anti-political doctrine before Malcolm’s recognition of the crucial work of the civil-rights activists and the need for global black political engagement prompted his break with the NOI to embrace what Marable terms Pan-Africanism. Moreover, Malcolm could not sanction Elijah Muhammad’s extramarital affairs and out-of-wedlock children, setting in motion a perilous countdown to NOI retribution. The Malcolm X revealed here was troublingly misogynist and occasionally precipitous in action and speech, but possessed a dauntless sincerity and intelligence that was only beginning to shape and clarify his message for humanity.
A bold, sure-footed, significant biography of enormous depth and feeling.Pub Date: April 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02220-5
Page Count: 594
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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