The most telling line of this well-crafted and timely story comes from Lewis as well: “They were friends, and didn’t even...
Dual biography of two of the most ardent, inspiring, and complex champions of American civil rights.
The lives of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were destined to be forever coupled, not least because of their complicated relationships with Bobby’s brother, John F. Kennedy. Here, longtime Vanity Fair journalist Margolick (Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, 2013, etc.) brings the same insight and cleareyed analysis that he has brought to his storied biographies and racially potent historical analyses. Although the lives of both men have been covered in detail, Margolick does a fine job of not only portraying crucial events—with the help of new interviews and newly unsealed histories and documents—but also plowing through the misty romanticism that still surrounds these men. “It’s instructive sometimes to study the pre-hagiographic histories of saints,” he writes. Here, Kennedy struggles to uncloak his reputation for being “ruthless” even as he has to shoulder the emotional burden of his brother’s assassination. King, meanwhile, “grew more famous, ambitious, revered and inspiring, loathed and threatening, angry, bitter, radical, desperate.” They lived their lives wary of each other, shadowboxing in the public arena, as illustrated by the dramatic historical photographs that punctuate the book. But via Margolick’s account, we learn these men had far more in common than even they thought, including struggles with depression that stand in stark contrast to the optimism they inspired in a nation. While there’s a fatalism that hangs over their arcs, it’s inspiring to see that both men were propelled, even to the end, by the causes of racial equality and social justice. “When these two young men were murdered, something died in all of us,” said civil rights icon John Lewis. “We were robbed of part of our future.”
The most telling line of this well-crafted and timely story comes from Lewis as well: “They were friends, and didn’t even know that they were friends.”Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948122-26-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Review Posted Online: March 19, 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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