A fair-minded memoir and portrayal of an exceptionally divisive civil rights–era politician.
A segregationist’s daughter recalls growing up on the wrong side of history in her debut memoir.
Kennedy, who lives in Montgomery, Alabama, makes it clear that she has no plans to whitewash the legacy of her father, four-term Alabama governor George Wallace (1919-1998), who proclaimed: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” The author writes that when Wallace denied any role in the brutal assaults on civil rights marchers in Selma, on the day known as Bloody Sunday, he resembled “Pontius Pilate washing his hands” of guilt. However, she tries gently to correct a few misperceptions of her father. When Wallace renounced his views on segregation after an assassination attempt left him a paraplegic, many observers saw it as another crass political move, but the author notes that in private conversations late in life, he was sincerely “ashamed and regretful.” She also shows poignantly the toll his actions took on his family and draws parallels between his tactics and those of Donald Trump. Before Wallace persuaded the Alabama legislature to change the law to allow him to serve more than one term as governor, he had his wife, Lurleen, run as his stand-in despite a recent diagnosis of uterine cancer; she died after 15 months in office. The author has suffered from chronic depression and received electroconvulsive therapy for “reactive psychosis caused by stress” even as she’s tried to ease others’ pain through civil rights activism. She doesn’t say whether the ECT helped or how she evolved from loyal daughter to social justice advocate—did she have a Damascene moment?—two of many subjects on which she seems to repress as much as express. Kennedy tells her story well, but she leaves the impression that—whether because of her Southern good manners or because some subjects are still too painful to talk about—her history involves more than she can yet say.
A fair-minded memoir and portrayal of an exceptionally divisive civil rights–era politician.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-365-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
