Rather heavy on political details, but Johnson’s appealing voice and youthful humor will earn readers’ admiration.
The oral history of 94-year-old Nellie Stone Johnson, an African-American who spent her life advocating equal rights,
organizing labor, and heralding education. Born on a farm in Lakeville, Minnesota, in 1905, Johnson was the oldest of nine children. She rode horses at six, drove a car at seven, and milked 30 cows a day when she was 12. With charm and intelligence, Johnson shares nearly a century of vivid memories of her immersion in political life—as a child, she watched her father help organize a cooperative associate for dairy farmers, and in 1998 she witnessed the election of Governor Jesse Ventura. Forced to fend for herself at an early age, Johnson took a job at the Minneapolis Athletic Club and recruited employees to join the labor union (of which she would eventually become vice president) as they rode the elevator she operated. Never religious, she describes her selfless outlook best by declaring, —you could almost call politics my religion, my God." Throughout her life, Johnson "never had time for a man," and her most important relationships were with fellow political progressives—whom she casually refers to as "Thurgood" (Marshall) or "Hubert" (Humphrey), among others. With lively anecdotes and sharp hindsight, Johnson describes her election to the Minneapolis library board, the seamstress business she set up and ran for years, her position on the state college board, the scholarship fund she established, and the many political campaigns she worked on. From beginning to end, she maintains a clear, conversational tone and a striking optimism toward her life’s work and ideals: "For people who tell me about the demise of politics, I tell them to drop dead."
Rather heavy on political details, but Johnson’s appealing voice and youthful humor will earn readers’ admiration.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-886913-35-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Ruminator Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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