Dees, civil-rights lawyer and co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, offers an eloquent memoir of his battles with the Ku Klux Klan and other right-wing hate organizations. Dees's autobiography, written with fellow attorney Fiffer, epitomizes the paradox of the New South. A white Southern Baptist who attended the Univ. of Alabama in the 1950's, and who made a fortune in the mail-order business, Dees appeared an unlikely candidate to become a crusading civil-rights lawyer. But the atrocities of his white neighbors against blacks involved in the civil-rights movement aroused in Dees a deep protest. Although his successful business freed him from the necessity of making a living as a lawyer, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center and started to bring civil-rights cases against the newly resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Dees describes in gripping detail his fight to protect Vietnamese victims of the Klan in Texas, and his ultimately victorious struggle to expose and punish the murderous activities of the United Klans of America. His description of the Klan and affiliated fascist groups like the American Nazi Party and the Order is truly frightening (more than once, these groups menaced Dees himself). Moreover, his narrative of his ultimate success is an inspiring example of the manner in which the American legal system, imperfect though it is, can solve social problems. A moving, powerful account of one man's struggle against injustice.
Pub Date: June 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-684-19189-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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