An unsettling demonstration of how a paranoid, reactionary government can treat significant artists.
An exposé of the governmental surveillance of James Baldwin (1924-1987), annotated by an accomplished literary scholar.
Maxwell (English and African-American Studies/Washington Univ.; F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, 2015, etc.) appreciates Baldwin’s radicalism, noting that he “often looks like today's most vital and most cherished new African American author.” The author argues that young black activists are particularly moved by him: “The impression that Baldwin has returned to preeminence, unbowed and unwrinkled, reflects his special ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter.” Yet, Maxwell sees an absurdist cautionary tale in how J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI obsessively shadowed Baldwin, with equal astuteness and incompetence, due to his political outspokenness and sexual frankness. Baldwin’s FBI file, updated through 1974, was the largest compiled on any African-American author. Since it was declassified following a 1998 court challenge (though still redacted), the file is a bizarre testament to governmental overreach. Maxwell presents the actual documentation in chronological order, using brief discussions to provide valuable context. Baldwin first attracted interest following the success of The Fire Next Time, his 1963 account of the early civil rights movement; he was first photographed by the FBI during protests in Selma that fall. Baldwin’s articulate discussion of the movement ironically made him a target, and he landed on Hoover’s “Security Index” of potential threats. As Maxwell notes, “the Bureau turned the tools and fruits of his literary success into investigative weapons against him.” Baldwin was well-aware of the scrutiny and baited the FBI with a long-promised but never-delivered book about their antagonism toward the black community. By 1968, the FBI was attempting to track Baldwin (now a reclusive expatriate) while focusing more on the black radicalism symbolized by the Malcom X murder and the Black Panthers. Maxwell adeptly curates the strange hoard of documentation, but the primary sources will be most appreciated by completists.
An unsettling demonstration of how a paranoid, reactionary government can treat significant artists.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-737-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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