Too densely academic in structure and execution for general readers, but a historical work of surpassing importance.
Of uncertain origins, Equiano rises from servitude to literary celebrity in 18th-century England.
Carretta (English/Univ. of Maryland) has published editions of Equiano’s 1789 autobiography (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oludah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African) and is a leading authority on both the man and his text. And, as he quickly acknowledges, much more is known about the latter than the former. Carretta shows that Equiano carefully, even artfully, crafted his African identity, yet two key documents indicate he was born in South Carolina. Continent of birth aside, there is no doubt he was a slave and that he endured many of the cruelties suffered by millions of others. Carretta’s narrative can at times be numbing: He expends many pages summarizing Equiano’s text—often using block quotations—repeating even the most dubious aspects of Equiano’s story (his African boyhood, his capture, the Middle Passage), as if to say, yes, it’s likely that none of this happened to him, but it did happen to others. The story becomes more engaging when Carretta tells what we do know about Equiano—his years at sea with the Royal Navy, his religious conversion to Methodism, his emerging careers as abolitionist and writer, his marriage. One of his first owners, a Royal Navy lieutenant, betrayed Equiano, refusing to free him as promised. Undeterred, Equiano earned enough to purchase his liberty, returned to England, spent some time as a hairdresser, domestic servant and laboratory assistant (for a man converting seawater to fresh) before publicly defining himself as an African, writing abolitionist newspaper articles and, finally, composing his autobiography, a text Carretta analyzes in scholarly fashion. Equiano married a white woman, made much money on his book, inherited other property from his wife’s estate and died in 1797 as England’s wealthiest man of African descent. His gravesite is unknown.
Too densely academic in structure and execution for general readers, but a historical work of surpassing importance.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2005
ISBN: 0-8203-2571-6
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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
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