Not without flaws but unquestionably inspiring.
A noted progressive activist’s account of his twin battles for social justice and against early-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
When Barkan celebrated his first wedding anniversary in 2016, he counted himself and his wife “the happiest and luckiest people we knew.” Both had jobs they loved, the author as an activist/lawyer for the Center for Popular Democracy and his wife as an English professor. Days later, he learned that what he thought was carpal tunnel syndrome was actually ALS. In this memoir, which he initially wrote to leave behind for both the progressive movement and the infant son he would not see grow to adulthood, Barkan looks back on his life and achievements. He begins with his social conscience awakening at Columbia University, where he became involved in radical political organizations. At Yale Law School, Barkan threw himself into work advocating for immigrant and worker rights. Rather than become a civil rights lawyer, the author did what “got my blood pumping”: argue about public policy and organize protests. At the end of the Occupy movement, he organized the Fed Up campaign, which sought to change Federal Reserve monetary policies to help low-income people. But just as Fed Up began gaining notoriety and traction several years later, Barkan faced increasing physical difficulties. In May 2017, he walked with a leg brace; by early 2018, he was wheelchair-bound and needed a ventilator to breathe. Despite the deep strains his condition produced in his marriage, he continued to fight alongside other progressives, embarking on a summertime “six-week, twenty-state trip, from California to Maine,” to help change the balance of power in Congress. Though sometimes self-congratulatory in tone, Barkan’s book—part of which he wrote with the assistance of a technology that allowed him to use only his eyes—still moves with its portrait of a man driven to act on his beliefs while learning to accept the injustice of early mortality.
Not without flaws but unquestionably inspiring.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982111-54-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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