A stunning story about everyday people combating a brutal history.
A riveting true story of courage and friendship in Jim Crow Mississippi.
With the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act upon us, here’s a story sure to attract attention—deservedly so. It tells the tale of an unlikely friendship between a white woman and a black woman in Mississippi in the 1950s. The story opens with the unjustified arrest of Ella Gaston and her husband, who are pulled over while driving and arrested in front of their children for no other reason than their skin color. Ella is eventually found guilty of intimidating an officer, but the verdict is remarkably overruled by the all-white Mississippi Supreme Court. To ensure that Ella’s future is problem free, her employer and all-around spitfire, Jewell McMahan, takes matters into her own hands; together, they concoct various plans to protect Ella from a retrial. The two stand strong against higher-ranking officials—not to mention an entire culture—dead set on keeping Ella and her race down. Johnson, a journalist, tells the story quite eloquently. She is particularly adept at pacing, which makes for an exciting read. Most impressively, Johnson weaves history into the narrative. Readers learn about Ella’s uneducated, almost hopeless past through an extended piece on the effects of the Civil War: “For its white citizenry, who had lived through the degradation of defeat without much bloodshed in their own backyards, the bitter determination to maintain the ‘Southern Way of Life’ remained a motivating cause for over a hundred years.” But Johnson doesn’t merely rely on generalization; readers also learn about various different pockets of the South and how they could determine one’s outlook. While raised in Kentucky, for instance, Jewell had had very little contact as a child and young adult with African-Americans; consequently, she had little patience with the prejudice she encountered as she aged and moved away from home. Her character is especially vivid, full of spunk and verve. In a way, she outshines Ella, who could use a bit more personality. Overall, though, the story is a remarkable one about friendship, racism and overcoming the odds.
A stunning story about everyday people combating a brutal history.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491730447
Page Count: 256
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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