A humble and timely book that speaks to an era of sweeping change and a reminder that faith and love are two of the best...
A memoir from one of the most understated yet pivotal players in the history of American civil rights.
While most of his work occurred outside of the spotlight, Brown has left a deep imprint on the history of the African-American struggle for equality. Oft-identified as a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and “the only person allowed to visit Nelson Mandela” during his Cape Town imprisonment, the author fleshes out a lifetime studded with important experiences. Growing up in the Jim Crow North Carolina of the 1930s and ’40s, Brown endured a hardscrabble childhood under the love and tutelage of his compassionate grandmother “Mama,” Miss Nellie Brown. “Whether singing in our church’s gospel choir or canning vegetables,” writes the author, “she called out Jesus with the best of them and she set our moral compasses with lessons from the Bible.” After a stint in local law enforcement, the author landed a job in New York as a federal narcotics agent, launching a series of events that would lead to his meeting with King in 1958 and later executing a staged narcotics buy for the “Senate Rackets Committee’s top lawyer,” Robert F. Kennedy. With greater ambitions, Brown moved back to his home state and founded the public relations firm B&C International, which become the anchor of his significant role as a race-relations liaison between the black and white communities—business, political, or otherwise. Among his many achievements, the author chronicles his five years working as special assistant to President Richard Nixon, a job in which he developed the pivotal Office of Minority Business Enterprise. Throughout the volume, weaving together the stories of milestones personal and cultural, Brown continually falls back on the echoes of his grandmother, whose wisdom included the mantra, “you can find good anywhere, and you can do good everywhere.”
A humble and timely book that speaks to an era of sweeping change and a reminder that faith and love are two of the best weapons to counter hatred.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6278-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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