A remarkable behind-the-scenes look at race relations and the ways in which American foreign policy is crafted and, most importantly, changed. In an era in which apathy colludes with Americans' increasing interest in putting themselves first to create an America of near strangers, this book provides inspirational proof that we not only can but must fight the racial status quo. Robinson, the product of a family of doers (his brother, Max Robinson, was a successful TV broadcaster before he died from AIDS), has had a stunning impact on American race relations in recent decades. In 1977 he founded TransAfrica, the first organization devoted solely to raising awareness of and influencing foreign policies toward African and Caribbean peoples. Under his direction, it has grown from a two-person organization to a national lobbying group with more than 15,000 members. More importantly, it has almost single-handedly helped change the course of history, thanks in no small part to Robinson's drive and remarkable focus. Among the organization's accomplishments thus far: convincing American politicians to invoke economic sanctions against South Africa, helping to free Nelson Mandela, and pushing President Clinton to provide better treatment for Haitian refugees in America and to force the exile of that country's military dictators so that President Aristide could return from his exile. A driven man, Robinson has used everything from savvy public relations maneuvers—in his years as a community activist in Boston, he once stuck 1,000 black crosses in the snow on Harvard's campus to press the university to divest its portfolio of Gulf Oil stock—to hunger strikes to get what he thinks is fair. At once provoking and poignant, this memoir reminds the reader of the value of getting justice rather than simply getting mad. (First serial to Essence)
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-94402-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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