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LIVING OUR STORIES, TELLING OUR TRUTHS

Name: LIVING OUR STORIES, TELLING OUR TRUTHS
Author: V.P. Franklin
ISBN: 0-689-12192-X

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE MAKING OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

by V.P. Franklin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1995

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | 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)