Wilkie is a savvy reporter, combining grace with tack-sharpness in this memorable portrait of a slice of the South over the...
A fluent and fluid memoir of growing up way down south, from Boston Globe reporter Wilkie.
As a poor white youth in 1940s and ’50s Mississippi, as a college student at Ole Miss, and later still as a newspaperman with the Clarksdale Press Register, Wilkie was witness to an era of extraordinary change in the American South. When he was a kid, bigotry was the way of life—African-Americans were “mud people,” Jews were “Babylonian Talmudists”—and Southerners held jealously to their culture, accent, music, and food. Widely stereotyped as a baroque lot living “as spiritual citizens of a nation that existed for only four years in another century” (and whose cult figures were a parade of eccentrics from Elvis to Bear Bryant), the federal government was about to give them a rude awakening via laws of desegregation. Wilkie lived through the thick of it—the rise of the Citizens Councils and the Klan, the coming of James Meredith, the sit-ins at Greensboro, the Freedom Riders—and he charts here how the sense of fairness inculcated in him by his mother evolved into an understanding of the injustice of segregation. Like many teenagers, he wanted to be a rebel, and it began to dawn on him that the true rebels were sitting at Woolworth lunch counters waiting vainly to be served. By the time Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, Wilkie had witnessed enough and he fled north. He offers a beautifully nuanced reading of the Carter presidency, trumped up for its Southern roots, its decency, and its honor. When the Globe returned Wilkie to the South to cover the place like a foreign country for readers in that chilly northern town, he immediately sensed that major changes (in both mindset and demographics) had taken place since he left—changes that have been unfortunately obscured by the recent brouhaha over the Mississippi state flag.
Wilkie is a savvy reporter, combining grace with tack-sharpness in this memorable portrait of a slice of the South over the past half-century.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87285-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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