A tumultuous life rendered in never-dull, enlightening fashion.
Jackson (English and History/Johns Hopkins Univ.; My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family After the Civil War, 2012, etc.) takes a confusing, twisted tale of a writer and lays it out in a readable, straightforward biography.
Chester B. Himes (1909-1984) was the child of teachers, and his mother home-schooled her children as they moved among Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri. She impressed upon her children, especially fair-skinned Chester, that they all had fine white blood. With middle-class black pretensions his lifelong scapegoat, Himes rebelled against his mother’s racist attitude to the darker of her own race. After a chemistry experiment blinded his brother, he lost his best companion and competition. In 1926, Himes fell down an elevator shaft, breaking his back, an accident that produced a small income from worker’s compensation. With acceptance to Ohio State, his anger at racism manifested itself, and his time was spent gambling, drinking, and taking drugs. Back in Cleveland, he was arrested for robbery and sentenced to 20 years in prison. There, he taught himself short story writing and wrote with his rare perspective on black life from American society’s margins. His prison stories were published widely, but he was still learning. Paroled in 1936, he married and moved to Los Angeles, polishing his ability to reproduce speech and identify black divisiveness. Fighting with publishers and paranoid about royalties that never came, he took his book advance and moved to France. While publishers in Paris were even tighter with royalties, Himes found life easier, cheaper, and less racist. Still, as Jackson clearly demonstrates, he couldn’t sell his books in the 1940s because of his politics nor in the ’50s because of their sexual content. Eventually, he developed his most profitable work in the Harlem detective stories about Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. He was able to discover his answer to racism in humor mingled with violence.
A tumultuous life rendered in never-dull, enlightening fashion.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-06389-9
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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