A former editor at the New York Times Book Review and the author of a well-received history of African-American humor (On the Real Side, 1994), Watkins here recalls his 1950s coming-of-age as a black youth in Youngstown, Ohio, and a student at mostly white Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. With measured and painstaking attention, Watkins details his thoughts and feelings, and people he knew, in his early life, examining the choices he made and his dawning consciousness of race. Reading the French existentialists in high school, he found himself ``suddenly immersed in ideas that seemed to support my own nagging suspicions about the absurdity of the social arrangement.'' At fraternity-dominated Colgate, far from home and friends, Watkins, though a basketball standout, was clearly an outsider. His story slows as he recounts weekend visits to Harlem and his interactions with coeds, black and white, at frat-house parties, but the details build to successful effect when Watkins, intrigued by James Baldwin's ``subtle, nuanced analysis'' of America's race problem, finds epiphany in that writer's still radical argument that race is a state of mind. His mother's own mixed background having shown the author that in America black blood is widely mingled with white, he determines to abandon the concept of race— to ignore others' assumptions about him as a black man and to renounce his own complicity in reinforcing those assumptions. The book's final page telescopes his later career in literary New York. Rich material, one might anticipate, for a subsequent memoir. Watkins sometimes traverses familiar territory about race, but with insight and telling detail—his description, for example, of the exhilaration of hurtling at high speed toward New York City while listening for the first time to Coltrane's newly released version of ``My Favorite Things'' (1960)—he manages to claim the era, and his identity, as his own.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80864-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
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