With fluent commentary and language, Franklin highlights the importance of autobiography in the African-American literary tradition. As Franklin (History and Political Science/Drexel Univ.) explains, autobiography has always been a powerful tool for people of African descent. The power of slave narratives, the first African-American autobiographies, was magnified by the fact that slaves were prohibited from reading and writing. The straightforward style of those narratives was imitated in the first African-American novels, such as Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy, or The Shadows Lifted (1853) and William Wells Brown's Clotelle, or the President's Daughter (1893). The autobiographical tradition has always served the dual purposes of telling a good tale and ``testifying'' to racial injustices, as Ida B. Wells-Barnett did in her memoirs, where in 1928 she described lynching as ``an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and `keep the nigger down.' '' Franklin explores Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston and their battle over African-American language—Wright's fluid, incisive, literary tone versus Hurston's rambunctious rendition of the Southern black dialect. He also performs a careful reading of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, but the best part of the book is his discussion of James Baldwin, in which he notes how Baldwin's dogged use of the first person in his essays, his willingness to expose himself, made his work so powerful. Franklin also shows how difficult it was for Baldwin to deal with both his race and his homosexuality in his early work (thus the white protagonists of his first overtly homosexual novel). As Baldwin later recalled: ``I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it.'' Luckily, there's room for that, and more, here. Extensive research enlivened by a good critical eye and vivid writing distinguishes this thoughtful book.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-689-12192-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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