A pleasant success story.
In this debut memoir, a black Air Force veteran recounts his unlikely rise from rural poverty to the upper middle class.
Born in the Arkansas Delta in 1943, Strother was the seventh child of poor parents. His mother worked various manual jobs, including picking cotton for local farmers; his father was the secretary and treasurer of his church. When the author was born, most of his neighbors over 40 couldn’t read or write and young people frequently moved to the North to find better employment opportunities. Strother was no different: “Even though I loved the people in my community, I disliked intensely almost everything about where I grew up. I always felt out-of-place.” As soon as he graduated from high school, he rushed to join the Air Force like his older brother Curtis. Experiencing racism from whites in the South while he was wearing his Air Force uniform—proof that he was willing to fight and die for the United States—brought home the discrimination that Strother would face throughout his life. But the Air Force provided him the opportunity to live abroad in West Germany, where, removed from the American dynamics of black and white, he was able to experience something closer to racial equality. After marrying a German woman and moving with her to Detroit, Strother did not let the expectations of others hold him back from pursuing the American dream. In his book, which features some family photographs, the author recounts attending night school to become a computer programmer, getting a job with a major corporation, working his way up to salesman and then district manager, and investing in real estate. Strother skillfully summons his memories using a simple, direct prose: “When Papa went to the bank to withdraw his money, it was closed and out of business. After that, he started to keep his money in Prince Albert tobacco containers, which he would bury around his house.” There’s a soothing rhythm to the narration, though it tends to ramble unpredictably. While Strother led an accomplished life, the achievements were not flashy ones, and he does not imbue them with much excitement. The author seems to intend for this to be an inspirational memoir, but readers will likely end up not feeling much emotion beyond a satisfaction that Strother’s life worked out nicely.
A pleasant success story.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4791-3902-6
Page Count: 259
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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