Any woman who divorces her first husband simply by declaring him dead is at the very least intriguing: Horne takes on a...
The journey of an itinerant activist, narrated by historian Horne (Fire This Time, not reviewed).
Shirley Graham Du Bois had a life in the arts and something of a political reputation before she married W.E.B. Du Bois, the noted scholar and civil rights leader, in his autumnal years. Horne would have us believe that she didn’t simply marry him as a matter of convenience (he was 81 and she was 55 at the time), but he acknowledges that Shirley’s marriage to Du Bois gave her life a stability and grounding that she never really had before. Extremely fair-skinned, Shirley (born in Indianapolis to Native Americans who claimed French, Scots, Irish, and English blood) always insisted that she was Negro. Her father was a much-traveled African Methodist Episcopal minister who took care to develop his daughter’s interest in music and writing. Shirley’s early years were a dilettante’s muddle of assorted colleges attended, countries visited, and opportunities missed. In the middle of the Depression she staged an opera (Tom Tom) with a cast of 500. No one came. She seemed to have a far greater talent for latching on to people of influence—from NAACP founder Mary White Ovington to Mao Tse Tung—and moving on in her opportunistic way. Slowly, she drifted into political involvement and married Du Bois during the heart of the “Red Scare”—a fact she seemed to enjoy flaunting whenever she took trips to the Soviet Union and China. In the 1960s she joined the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah, then the president of Ghana. A Communist, she became a citizen of Tanzania and died in China in 1977. Chou En Lai attended her funeral.
Any woman who divorces her first husband simply by declaring him dead is at the very least intriguing: Horne takes on a difficult subject and does a serviceable job.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8147-3615-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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