Preachiness aside: a lively, intelligent example of African-American Christian uplift.
In a memoir larded with inspirational messages, its title borrowed from her syndicated column, Young describes her childhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, during the Carter and Reagan administrations.
The author’s black neighborhood, Stoner Hill, seems a throwback to an earlier time: a semi-rural world in which clichéd idylls of strawberry-picking, church attendance, and loving family gatherings contrast with the more dramatic if no less familiar incidents of violence and failed ambition that poverty engenders. Whites remain a vague enemy, seldom actually encountered. Young Londa grows up influenced by three powerful women. Londa’s mother survives being shot by her ex-husband when Londa is six to do whatever it takes to provide a stable and upwardly mobile life for her children and herself. Despite unrelenting poverty, Londa’s grandmother maintains a supportive and loving home in which she and her husband raise a passel of children. Londa’s great-grandmother, “Big Momma,” is the spiritual heart of this devoutly Baptist family, and in Big Momma’s tradition, Young cannot resist teaching lessons. Even her earliest memory, of playing musical chairs her friends in their Head Start class, makes the game an obvious metaphor for a world in which there will not be enough opportunities to go around. Smart and ambitious, Londa gets the opportunities. When the Stoner Hill kids integrate a white middle school, her mother fights to get her onto the college track, and Londa ends up a student-council member. While the always morally uplifting endings to her stories can become tiresome, the author’s sense of humor about herself is winning. Here’s a girl who can admit to following the rules in The Preppy Handbook for months without realizing that they were written in irony, but who can also admit that those Polo shirts purchased under its sway felt awfully good next to her skin.
Preachiness aside: a lively, intelligent example of African-American Christian uplift.Pub Date: March 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50493-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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