by Kerri K. Greenidge ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 19, 2019
An absorbing biography that offers a fresh perspective on African American history.
A prominent newsman helped shape decades of civil rights activism.
Greenidge (Consortium of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora/Tufts Univ.) makes her literary debut with an impressively researched biography of African American newspaperman and activist William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934), whose uncompromising views made him an influential—and controversial—figure. Born in Boston, raised among educated blacks dubbed “negrowumps,” the precocious Trotter “was reading and writing entire Bible passages by four” and later participated, at his parents’ dinner parties, in “passionate, often raucous debate over racial representation, political radicalism, and the continued deterioration of black civil rights.” He enjoyed a comfortable middle-class childhood, taking piano lessons, playing tennis, and attending desegregated schools. After graduating at the top of his high school class, he went on to Harvard, where he was both popular and respected, a leader among his classmates. “Confident in the principles under which he’d been raised,” Greenidge writes, “Monroe had no reason to believe that he and his colored fellows could not ‘plan a new world’ in which all could contend for racial equality.” That vision was undermined, as he saw it, by Booker T. Washington’s insistence on “conservative racial uplift.” Black citizens, Trotter believed, were being “duped into their own enslavement” by Washington’s refusal to support black dissent and radical efforts to claim civil rights. In 1901, to counter those ideas, Trotter started his own newspaper, the Boston Guardian, aimed at working-class blacks. Within a short time, it became “the greatest race paper” in America, opening its readers’ eyes to radical black politics in Boston and, as the years went on, throughout the country. Greenidge presents Trotter’s growing prominence as a spokesman and gadfly in the context of economic, political, and often violent social upheaval in the first decades of the 20th century. A “prickly” and “inflammatory” personality, Trotter nevertheless attracted loyal followers, buoyed by his “populist demand for racial pride and political respect.” He was, writes the author, “an icon of New Negro idealism, an unapologetic ‘race man’ ready and willing to present his blackness before the world.”
An absorbing biography that offers a fresh perspective on African American history.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-534-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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