An elegantly written memoir that reflects more on world history than on personal history.
Marshall (Literature and Culture/New York Univ.; The Fisher King, 2000, etc.) recounts her coming of age in Brooklyn, the Caribbean and Africa.
She opens with “Homage to Mr. Hughes”—poet Langston, that is, who became Marshall’s mentor and friend after they met at a party celebrating the release of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959. Hughes subsequently invited the novice writer to accompany him on a cultural tour of Europe. Marshall’s warm, reverent portrait includes charming anecdotes about his affinity for nightlife and excerpts from his handwritten notes, always penned in green ink. Subsequent chapters are adapted from a series of lectures the author delivered at Harvard on “Bodies of Water.” Marshall focuses on the three that made up the triangular slave-trade route: the James River, the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. She mingles the history of each with the chronicle of her life and development as a writer. Her parents were from Barbados, a principal way station in the slave trade. They moved to Brooklyn, where Marshall grew up in a close-knit West Indian community and first discovered her passion for books. She drew inspiration for her early writing from Barbados and used the advance for Brown Girl to spend a year in the island nation revising her manuscript and reconnecting with her parents’ native ground. After receiving a 1962 Guggenheim grant she spent another year in the Caribbean, this time on Grenada and its tiny satellite island, where she attended an annual Big Drum/Nation Dance ceremony. The final chapter describes FESTAC ’77, a cultural festival that brought together in Nigeria artists from the entire African continent and from the diaspora to the Americas. Marshall and other Americans were welcomed as Omowalies (Yoruba for “the child has returned”). This sense of a far-flung African community informs the author’s lush descriptions and informative historical accounts, though these later portions of the book lack the approachable intimacy of her opening homage to Hughes.
An elegantly written memoir that reflects more on world history than on personal history.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-465-01359-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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