Not without flaws but an important account of coming of age (and rage) within today’s explosive racial dynamic.
A founder of Black Lives Matter chronicles growing up sensitive and black in a country militarized against her community.
With assistance from Bandele (Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother's Story, 2009, etc.), Khan-Cullors synthesizes memoir and polemic to discuss oppressive policing and mass imprisonment, the hypocrisy of the drug war, and other aspects of white privilege, portraying the social network–based activism of BLM and like-minded groups as the only rational response to American-style apartheid. She argues repeatedly and powerfully that mechanisms have evolved to ensnare working-class people of color from childhood, while white Americans are afforded leniency in their youthful trespasses. She learned of such hidden codes early, and she documents her hardscrabble but vibrant upbringing in segregated, suburban Los Angeles during the 1980s. The drug war’s resurgence, and a newly punitive attitude toward the poor, cast a shadow over the lives of her endlessly working mother and her male relatives: “[My brother] and his friends—really all of us—were out there trying to stay safe against the onslaught of adults who, Vietnam-like, saw the enemy as anyone Black or Brown.” Her perspective was amplified by attending segregated, gifted schools in adjoining white suburbs, where she explored the arts and acknowledged her queer sexuality while developing a passion for social organizing. Later, her outrage over the unpunished killings of Trayvon Martin and others led her and two friends to brainstorm a new, viral social justice movement: “We know we want whatever we create to have global reach.” The author’s passion is undeniable and infectious, but the many summary-based passages sometimes feel repetitive, and the concrete narrative of BLM’s expanding activism is underdeveloped. Since she emphasizes her organizational focus as prioritizing the role of women of color and LBGT or gender-nonconforming individuals, the audience for this socially relevant jeremiad may be limited.
Not without flaws but an important account of coming of age (and rage) within today’s explosive racial dynamic.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17108-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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