Rarely plumbs new depths of insight on America’s struggles with racial violence.
With the assistance of Spagnola, police-brutality victim and racial lightning rod King reflects on his 1991 beating by Los Angeles police officers and the riots and courtroom drama that followed.
In his debut nonfiction book, King—a name which by his own admission has become “synonymous with drinking, DUIs, domestic violence, reckless driving, civil rights violations, police brutality [and] hate crimes”—provides a simply told tale of his experiences with racism and alcoholism and the night that would forever mar his life. While the title implies a psychological journey, most of King’s revelations offer little more than surface-level reporting. The majority of the factual information can be read in any newspaper or on Wikipedia; the author is at his best when he shares the personal details of his story. In a particularly revealing moment, King describes disguising himself in a Bob Marley wig in an attempt to observe the riots spurred by the acquittal of the police officers. Watching from a few blocks away, he describes feeling “that terrible presence of hatred that I felt the night of the beating, that palpable wall of loathing that was absolutely suffocating.” Unfortunately, these insights are rare, and King’s play-by-play recounting of the courtroom drama is not nearly as interesting as his own thoughts on racial violence. Early on he writes, “I have been asked countless times if I’ve forgiven those officers for beating me. The short answer is yes.” However, the long answer is far more complicated, and King's dry, spare reportage continually overwhelms personal reflection.
Rarely plumbs new depths of insight on America’s struggles with racial violence.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-219443-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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