The book flows easily from one quest to the next, always delivering unbiased information supported by well-researched facts.
Readers may not recognize the author’s name, but he has been fighting for the rights of underdogs for nearly 60 years. His autobiography describes his entry into the world of political activism with the modesty often found in those who overachieve.
During his days at Brooklyn Law School in the 1940s, Lane (Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK, 2011, etc.) began his fight for the rights of the voiceless. He became the student leader of the National Lawyers Guild, a society formed in answer to the American Bar Association’s conservative, occasionally racist policies. After admission to the bar, Lane’s life as an activist took off as one pro bono case after another introduced him to all the main players of the period. He dined with W.E.B. Du Bois, invited blacklisted Pete Seeger to play at a fundraiser, fought the House Un-American Activities Committee and led the effort to clean up the draconian policies of the Wassaic State School for Mental Defectives. Lane ran for and was elected to the New York State Assembly in order to open the door for minorities, and the reputation he built introduced him to many of the movers and shakers of the late 20th century: Eleanor Roosevelt, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Dick Gregory, William F. Buckley, Jane Fonda, Bertrand Russell, among others. He worked with anyone struggling for a voice, from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to the Black Panthers. He rode as a Freedom Rider, worked for JFK and then wrote Rush to Judgment (1966) to exonerate Lee Harvey Oswald. As one would expect of a person of this caliber, Lane’s story focuses on the needs of those he served rather than the extraordinary part he played in so many lives.
The book flows easily from one quest to the next, always delivering unbiased information supported by well-researched facts.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61374-001-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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
SEEN & HEARD
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