Continuing from the deeply affecting first volume of her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Angelou, sixteen, has given birth to her illegitimate son Guy, WW II has just ended, there's optimism in the land and racism, blacks are telling themselves, was only a temporary aberration (didn't we, after all, work together for the defense effort?). But the mood abruptly comes to ground, Angelou's poetic prose turns tougher and the remembering evokes an immediacy of long-ago dejection. Heeding Mama's advice not to "chippy," to walk tall — Mama was the "baddest" lady ever (and surely she was) — Angelou hits the road out of San Francisco, things close to the edge, back to Stamps, Arkansas, to the security of a grandmother, only to take flight just as quickly again, a step ahead of southern retribution. And instead of the longed-for cashmere sweater-set June Allyson life, there was to be dead time spent as a "Daddy's 'ho" (she was only one of many he has working the Sacramento Valley farm towns, although Angelou wasn't to know that until later); learning how to short-order cook in joints; dreaming of her name in lights in the dance team of Poole & Rita (he resplendent in powder blue tux, she, Rita, in a sequined swimsuit); success of sorts as a madam herself of a two-lesbian house — so much happening that one is stunned at book's end to realize that Angelou is then all of 19. Whitey is prominent here only by indirection — Angelou's too involved "tending to business" to care about reminding us of things we should in any case already understand. Her own thing on her own terms — worlds removed from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man carrying his patron's letter, "keep this nigger running" — and because of it, Angelou's stature, as a writer, a woman, a black, grows, walks tall.
Pub Date: May 17, 1974
ISBN: 0812980301
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1974
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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