Race and guns make an explosive combination.
Young chronicles his attempts to bond with his white father-in-law by embracing the gun culture that he previously held at arm’s length.
Toward the end of this short memoir about marriage, guns, and race in America, the author writes, “gun culture in America is inherently racist because white people historically fear black men with guns.” He builds a convincing case that the NRA has become predominantly concerned with protecting the Second Amendment rights of white people to protect their property against the black intruders they most fear. He also notes how an increasing number of black people, particularly black women, are arming themselves, feeling like if they don’t protect themselves, who will? “We are in a literal arms race,” he writes, “ramped up by the racialized fear peddled to us by damn near every institutionalized force in the land.” Amid his reportage, his personal story—about his mixed marriage and how it played out in conservative Oklahoma, where he always felt like a minority—doesn’t hold together quite as well. He first noticed his wife-to-be as a privileged white girl at a graduation party where he was the lone black guest. He always thought of her, at least within this book, as white first and was conscious of himself as black first. But they got together and stayed together, at least until the Donald Trump victory, “when my country chose to show its true face, as bigotry stood at the doorstep and opened the door wide,” and as he impulsively shouted, “I hate white people!” His wife, naturally enough, took offense, but rather than proceeding into a discussion of race and complex emotions, it led to the end of the marriage. Before then, however, he had committed himself to becoming a better shot than his marksman father-in-law and an instructor certified by the NRA.
Race and guns make an explosive combination.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-82633-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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