A thoughtfully argued memoir that shows—as if proof were needed—that “the struggle to make equality for all people a...
An architect of the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education suit recalls a long life spent fighting for equal treatment under the law.
Born in 1917 in Florida, Carter was taken as an infant to New Jersey. For all the supposed advancement above the Mason-Dixon line, he writes, “I am more alienated from whites than are black southerners of my generation.” Surely, by this account, he has many reasons to be alienated. New Jersey schools were segregated in fact as well as in law; when he was in high school, Carter recalls, the state Supreme Court ruled that public school facilities had to be made available to all students; and when he reported this to his teachers, he was immediately threatened with expulsion. As the first black graduate law student at Columbia, Carter met with his professors’ certainty that he “was not up to the task” merely by virtue of his ethnicity. And in the Army during WWII, Carter was accused of being a troublemaker, demoted from junior officer ranking and made eligible for draft as an enlisted man, though his demotion was later adjusted to an honorable discharge disqualifying him from further service. “Without the army experience,” Carter writes, “I might have discounted the impact of race and believed falsely that a black man could rise or fall based on his own talents.” Carter’s years of service as assistant to NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall, as the organization’s general counsel and, later, as a federal judge, did much to convince him otherwise. There are useful revelations here. For one, while Brown v. Board proved to be critically important in ending school segregation, Carter reveals that the NAACP had been preparing cases throughout the former Confederacy, finally choosing Kansas because “we might get a ruling in our favor, or a different kind of analysis of the problem than we could expect from the Deep South.”
A thoughtfully argued memoir that shows—as if proof were needed—that “the struggle to make equality for all people a fundamental tenet in our society continues.”Pub Date: May 12, 2005
ISBN: 1-56584-830-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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