An instructive book that attempts to extend the message of brotherhood and compassion that has been forged from tragedy.
Tragedy opens a dialogue between a former white supremacist and an Indian immigrant whose father was killed in a massacre at a Wisconsin Sikh temple.
As the title suggests, bad can lead to at least some good, and violence to healing, when it gets different kinds of people to talk to each other, understand each other, and even learn to love each other. Early on, Serve 2 Unite co-founder Kaleka admits, “my anger was eating me alive” following the 2012 murder of his father amid a shooting rampage by a white supremacist. Though former skinhead Michaelis (My Life After Hate, 2010) hadn’t known the killer, he recognized him as if he were looking in a mirror at his younger self. “My gut told me what no one was reporting yet,” he writes. “This was a strike by the radicalized far-right movement. An attack to say, ‘You’re threatening our race and we’re going to eliminate you before you destroy us.’ It had all the markings of white supremacists—specifically, racist skinheads, the faction I helped to establish nearly twenty years before.” The narrative alternates between the immigrant’s story of coming to and adjusting to the Midwest and the one-time racist’s story of years venting his rebellious anger and then eventually overcoming it. It climaxes with the murderous attack, which left emotions raw and both co-authors searching for answers. They found them in each other and successfully established a dialogue that bridged their very different backgrounds and led to the formation of Serve 2 Unite, an organization of “relentless optimism in the face of adversity” through which the two “continue their mission as brothers in a quest to bring about healing and wage peace.”
An instructive book that attempts to extend the message of brotherhood and compassion that has been forged from tragedy.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-10754-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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