Engaging, intelligent, and likely to be of much interest to general readers, as well as of value in courses in American...
A finely rendered portrait of two Southern abolitionists and civil-rights activists, and of the time in which they lived.
Journalist Perry (Conceived in Liberty, 1997, etc.) traces the evolution of the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, from antebellum Charleston liberals to influential Philadelphia reformists over the space of a few short years, sent there by a voice from heaven that instructed the Quaker spinster Sarah to “Go north. Go north.” Their abandonment of their home was a long time coming, but no surprise: Perry relates that young Sarah’s father caught her teaching a slave how to read, “in violation of the family’s traditions, Southern customs, and the strict slave codes of the state,” and that Angelina was quick to join her sister in rejecting the traditions of their state, family, and class. Their efforts, though little celebrated in standard texts of 19th-century history, were of great importance in forging the abolitionist cause through the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. More than reporting the details of the Grimké sisters’ lives and deeds, interesting enough though they are, Perry offers a learned survey of American social history in the mid-19th century, providing a vivid account of the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening and connecting the quest of their contemporaries for earthly salvation to the sisters’ thwarted determination to lead lives of religious devotion. Perry also does a nice job of introducing what would become a life-altering discovery for the sisters after the Civil War: the fact that their brother had fathered children with a “free person of color,” two of whom would, with the sisters’ help, go on to become important figures in the post-Reconstruction civil-rights movement.
Engaging, intelligent, and likely to be of much interest to general readers, as well as of value in courses in American history, women’s studies, and African American studies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03011-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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