Elegant, energetic biography of controversial Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell (1908-72), by Boston Globe reporter Haygood. This is the story of a pampered minister's son (Powell's father was pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose congregation of 15,000 is the country's largest) who, after trying briefly to pass as white at Colgate, became a thunderous spokesman for the nation's blacks. Haygood traces Powell's rise from the fight to reform Harlem Hospital that first brought him notice at age 25 to his role in shaping War on Poverty legislation that brought billions to bear on the nation's poor. But Powell's methods, the author explains, often were questionable: He once threatened to expose an alleged sexual liaison between Martin Luther King, Jr., and a male aide unless the aide called off some picketing that Powell considered inopportune. Powell's tumultuous personal life and financial irregularities opened him to envy, opprobrium, and attack. Loner, gadfly, ombudsman, dandy, debauchee, Powell was both devil and Daniel Webster in the eyes of his colleagues, who voted to deny him his seat in Congress in 1947, a move reversed as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. His ribald exploits and improbable tales—Powell would often retell a joke he'd heard as if it had happened to him—made him a legend of the Harlem Renaissance; his work with LBJ formed a substantive legislative achievement. Haygood tells the story vividly, occasionally giving the warts a force-of-nature gloss. An absorbing and sympathetic account of a highhanded spokesman for the downtrodden. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-395-44094-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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