The hardened voice of experience, steely and honest.
L.A.’s South Central ghetto, reduced to cliché in a raft of books, movies and rap songs, is seen afresh in this harrowing yet hopeful memoir.
Taken away from an abusive mother when she was five, the author spent three years in temporary foster-care placements, where conditions were “far worse than [those] I was removed from.” Gang-ridden South Central was actually an improvement, even though Jones was part-white, part-Native American, and the neighborhood was almost entirely African-American. Her new home was headed by Big Mom, a force of nature who held down two jobs and kept the Sabbath while raising the four children of her crack-addicted daughter, as well as the author. In calm, declarative prose, Jones lays out her experiences. For all her work and love, Big Mom quickly lost her two grandsons to the lure of the neighborhood Bloods. Her foster daughter soon signed up with the gang as well. “I choose to write as we chose to speak in the world of my childhood,” Jones tells readers, explaining her use of nearly impenetrable slang and swapping the letter b for c: In this world, members of rival gangs hated each other so much that “Bloods smoke bigarettes and Crips celebrate C-day rather than B-days.” The years are a steady march of deaths and the crushing disappointments of poverty, lit up only by the occasional hint that Jones, who’s urged by a teacher to think about college, might have the inclination as well as the smarts to escape the gang trap laid out for her. For all the agony and heartache that lashes across the pages, there’s never a hint of self-pity—just the voice of a passionate advocate who demands that the people she grew up with, well-rendered in bright, short portraits, be seen and remembered as human.
The hardened voice of experience, steely and honest.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59448-977-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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