Will appeal to students of civil rights history and the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts.
Lauterbach (Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, 2015, etc.) examines the life of a noted African-American photographer who also worked as an informant for the FBI during the peak of the civil rights movement.
Ernest Withers (1922-2007) documented black life in Bluff City—Memphis, Tennessee, that is—as thoroughly as Addison Scurlock did in Washington, D.C., and James Van Der Zee in Harlem. “He covered the 1960s,” writes the author, “as Mathew Brady covered the 1860s.” Brady was wider ranging, but there’s no denying that Withers caught some signally important moments in the city’s history, including Elvis Presley visiting a black nightclub in June 1954, “the last month of anonymity in Elvis Presley’s existence.” Self-taught and aware of the difficulties of making a living with his camera, having worked mostly the funeral circuit, Withers became a police officer in the late 1940s after returning from service in World War II to a Memphis that, sharply divided on color lines and run by a racist white known as “Boss Crump,” was making tentative steps toward allowing black officers to work in black neighborhoods—in Withers’ case, on Memphis’ famed Beale Street. It was a time when the NAACP and other civil rights organizations worked to secretly register black voters, and some unknown person in the FBI’s Memphis office “identified Withers as a potential informant on criminal cases.” In the guise of working as a photographer, Withers recorded Martin Luther King Jr. on several occasions, including the sanitation workers’ strike at the very end of King’s life. Lauterbach is perhaps a touch forgiving of Withers’ apparent motivation, his fears that young blacks would “get a distorted view of society and are engaging in and experiencing a socialist-oriented ‘beatnik’ type experience for which they are educationally, emotionally, and culturally ill-equipped to deal," as one white FBI agent put it.
Will appeal to students of civil rights history and the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-24792-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
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