A provocative memoir that goes to the heart of our American identity as Haizlip (owner of a public-relations firm), while searching for her mother's family—blacks who passed for whites- -confronts the deeply intertwined but often suppressed tensions between race and skin color. From childhood, Haizlip was aware of her mother's underlying melancholia, and as Margaret Taylor neared her 80th birthday, her daughter decided to find the family that the woman had lost when, at age four, she'd been left in the care of her darker-skinned relatives. The beautiful, alabaster-skinned Margaret had grown up to be ostracized because she was identified with the black side of the family—the side her own siblings chose to ignore by passing as white. ``I am a black woman, but many of you would never know it, my skin is as light as that of an average white person,'' Haizlip observes, raising the delicate question of pigmentocracy among blacks as she traces her family's roots. These include Martha Washington; an Irish grandmother; Native Americans; and a white indentured servant. The author notes that some geneticists claim that 95% of ``white'' Americans have varying degrees of black heritage, while 75% of African-Americans have at least one white ancestor. But Haizlip's memoir is more than a lesson in genealogy or race: It's also a family story, with memorable heroes, heroines, and villains. The author contrasts the Dickensian horrors of her mother's early life with the relatively idyllic childhood she enjoyed as the daughter of a prominent Baptist minister, and covers her own education at Wellesley; her marriage and professional life; and the happy outcome of her search—the reuniting of her mother and her remaining siblings. Finally, Haizlip admits to having ``grown less certain about the vagaries of race...more cautious in labeling or pigeonholing others.'' A moving tale of family sorrows and secrets—as well as a courageous and candid search for the truth, however painful it might be. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79235-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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