A gritty and somber chronicle of an often overlooked community.
A year in the lives of 10 inner-city men fighting to keep black cowboy culture alive and well even as their personal lives are in disarray.
By the time New York Times reporter Thompson-Hernández caught up with them, the Los Angeles–based Compton Cowboys seemed to be experiencing a wishful and elegiac pall. The equine outpost, which had always served as refuge and home away from home throughout the crew’s often tumultuous and traumatized childhoods, was in dire straits. Mayisha Akbar, the indomitable force of nature who founded the Compton Junior Posse in 1988, was heading toward retirement, and the big-money donors that had kept the expensive operation afloat were slowly disappearing. The mantle of ranch leadership was about to shift to Randy, Mayisha’s nephew. While Randy understood what was required to allow the group to blaze a new trail into the future, the stakes were high: keeping alive the legacy and heritage of men like Nat Love and Bill Pickett, real-life black cowboys who, despite Hollywood’s whitewashing of history, were integral in establishing what became known as the Wild West. However, regardless of their determination to pass down the black cowboy tradition to the next generation of new riders, the CJP members had to cope with the daily realities of life on the gang-scarred streets of Compton. In his intimate yet sober-eyed narrative, Thompson-Hernández never shies away from those realities. All of the Compton Cowboys, to some degree, have struggled with the PTSD associated with the neighborhood's dangerous landscape. Across the board, there continues to be unresolved anger and alcoholism, self-doubt and trepidation. Describing Mayisha’s retirement party, the author writes, “the future of the ranch was uncertain and everyone in attendance looked at the cowboys for answers that they did not have.” The author’s fondness and respect for the CJP crew is consistently patent (only occasionally overly so), and he tells their story straight, no matter how much it hurts.
A gritty and somber chronicle of an often overlooked community.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291060-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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