A timely story of fragmentation and division and of picking one’s way through the minefield that was—and is—the racially...
“The only thing I felt certain about was how little progress I was making in understanding my grandfather”—a searching quest for roots in the African-American heartland.
Raised in Southern California, marked by “proper English and love of Phil Collins,” film producer Johnson was deemed “too white” by her black schoolmates and decidedly black by her white ones. She admits to a certain discomfort with other black people, a sense that at least some of her kin were “trying to make life sound harder than it really was in order to justify their own complacency.” Much of that sense of privilege melts away in the face of her on-the-ground experiences in her family’s old hometown of Greenwood, Mississippi, where her grandfather Booker was murdered in 1973. The circumstances of his death, at the hands of a black patron of his restaurant, speak to untold complexities of race and class. As Johnson writes, Booker was “a difficult man to know.” Though he was reserved, he was blessed with a business acumen that had a “Midas touch” element to it but that also brought him into conflict with members of both the white and black communities; he was generous with some, stingy with others, and “so indecipherable that even those who worked by his side for years could only describe him from a relative distance, as if he weren’t a real person but rather a well-crafted representation of one.” At ground zero of the civil rights movement in the South, Greenwood proved a difficult place for one seeking to be left alone, resented by poor whites and blacks alike for his success; Booker apparently returned the favor, winning enemies as well as admirers. Johnson’s story is highly personal, but it folds easily into the larger story of African-Americans striving for economic and political betterment.
A timely story of fragmentation and division and of picking one’s way through the minefield that was—and is—the racially riven South.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5494-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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