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LOSE YOUR MOTHER

Name: LOSE YOUR MOTHER
Author: Saidiya Hartman
ISBN: 0-374-27082-1

A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE

by Saidiya Hartman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2007

A provocative work, tinged with sadness and anger.

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Somber meditation by a descendant of slaves who journeyed to Africa to understand her past.

In 1997, Hartman (English/UC Berkeley) went to Ghana as a Fulbright Scholar and spent a year researching the slave trade. “Intent on tracing an itinerary of destruction from the coast to the savanna,” she did much more than simply uncover the past; her book describes a deeply personal journey taken by a woman who insists that the ghosts of slavery still haunt the present. The author visited Elmina, the place where slaves captured in the hinterlands by Africans were sold to European slave traders and warehoused before shipment across the Atlantic to the New World. She traveled north to visit Salaga, home of the largest slave market in Ghana. The text mingles accounts of her explorations of the present-day sites, including Elmina’s underground dungeon, with the dark stories of their pasts, conjuring up brutal, bloody images. Hartman also weaves in the story of her own ancestors—or rather, of how little she knows about them, since to be a slave is to “lose your mother”: to lose your identity, your past, your country. The author’s research into the slave trade turns up a host of vivid and gruesome details, including a horrific account of the torture and murder of a young woman by a British sea captain who was later tried and acquitted of the crime. She depicts herself throughout as a lonely figure, regarded as an outsider by Ghanaians. Their ancestors were fortunate enough to elude capture, so they did not share the sense of loss that shaped Hartman’s and many other African-American lives.

A provocative work, tinged with sadness and anger.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007

ISBN: 0-374-27082-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)