A skillful depiction of the people and the scenes surrounding the killing of the champion of the civil rights movement.
An encapsulation of the civil rights reformer’s life through the lens of the 31 hours before his assassination in 1968.
Investigative journalist Rosenbloom, formerly of the Boston Globe, Frontline, and Inc., reinforces the story of the end of Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarkable life with an integrated summary of the career that brought him finally to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in spring 1968. The garbage collectors of Memphis, virtually all black, were on strike. Earlier in the city, rioting marred a march led by King, who was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the time. Though the SCLC was in the midst of planning a Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C., King, depressed and weary, felt compelled to return to Tennessee to lead another demonstration. The author details a pending injunction against King’s participation and the negotiations with unreliable and demanding gang members recruited as likely marshals and a stubborn mayor. Rosenbloom also concisely describes the quotidian bonding of King and his diverse associates, and he doesn’t ignore King’s relationship with his wife, Coretta, as well as his extramarital adventures. The personality and moods—often dark, sometimes frolicsome—of the supremely gifted orator and preacher are a salient feature of the author’s report. Also integral to the text are the late-afternoon activities of King's feckless murderer, James Earl Ray. The portrayal of Ray in his perch watching the civil rights leader at the Lorraine Motel is succinctly cinematic. The previous night was stormy as King spoke to a disappointingly small crowd, but his words were memorable. He mused on the possibility of a curtailed life, but, he said, he had “been to the mountain.” He was only 39 when he died.
A skillful depiction of the people and the scenes surrounding the killing of the champion of the civil rights movement.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-8338-3
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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