If you thought the right wing was in a lather over Bill Ayres, wait until its talking heads get hold of this unapologetic...
Provocative memoir by the antiwar activist best known for his role in the Columbia University occupation of 1968.
Rudd was a nice boy from New Jersey when he came to Columbia, but the war in Vietnam was raging and racial tensions were wound extremely tight. His trajectory was quick: He became an activist in and then leader of Students for a Democratic Society, whose sit-in strike and occupation of several university buildings were front-page news around the world—and proved to be ineluctably divisive. “Things were happening so fast by that point that I only dimly understood we had passed the point of no return,” Rudd writes of the occupation. That describes subsequent events too, including the increasing radicalization of SDS and its splintering to form, among other groups, the Weather Underground, committed to violent revolution. Once in, the Weathermen found, it was hard to get out; Rudd was reminded that “anyone who pulled out of the action would have to be ‘offed’ for the sake of security.” Around the time that a few unlucky Weathermen blew up themselves and a Greenwich Village townhouse while making bombs, Rudd went underground, fleeing various criminal charges, living as close to an anonymous life as possible, working factory and construction jobs, trying to keep a low profile and always fearing that he would be discovered. The author, who finally surrendered to authorities only to find most of the charges against him had gone cold or were dismissed by illegal government actions, made a life as a math teacher far from New York. Wistfully regretful about excesses and missteps, Rudd nonetheless insists, “I might have been wrong about a lot of things, but I’d been right in opposing the war and about the antiwar movement, which had played an important role in ending it.”
If you thought the right wing was in a lather over Bill Ayres, wait until its talking heads get hold of this unapologetic book, which deserves to be read and discussed.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-147275-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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