Brent's riveting memoirs of his odyssey through memorable times, from a Louisiana sharecropper's shack to exile in Cuba. In June 1969, Brent hijacked a TWA airliner en route from Oakland to New York City and diverted it to Cuba. Appropriately, this event comes almost precisely midpoint in Brent's memoirs, because there are two virtually distinct life stories here. In the first, Brent talks about growing up in poverty in bad neighborhoods where the lure of the street and his own rebellious inclinations led him from school to a life of drugs, drink, and petty crimes; to jail; to a political awakening as a Black Panther; and finally, to a violent shootout with the police. The post-hijacking story is about Brent's life in Cuba, where he fled after the shootout. Brent spent nearly two years in jail as a suspected American agent (falsely accused, he alleges, by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver) before finally being released to a villa full of fellow hijackers and non-Cuban would-be revolutionaries. Unlike most of his fellow expatriates, Brent slowly integrated himself into Cuban life; now 65, he lives in retirement in Havana. Both stories are told so dispassionately that they could almost have been written by a journalist tapping into Brent's memories, but the narrative's spareness does nothing to detract from its power or fascination. With remarkably little cant, rhetoric, or bitterness, and with a fair amount of criticism of both himself and his revolutionary colleagues, Brent offers an everyman's inside view of growing up poor in black America, of the Black Panthers, and of Cuba. Brent's story reads like a novel concocted to take readers inside the mind of a black revolutionary and revolutionary Cuba; that it is true makes it an important chronicle of our times.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2486-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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