An authoritative dual biography from a leading scholar of African American history.
A revisionist study of the parallel lives of two of America’s most significant African American leaders.
Joseph (Political Values and History/Univ. of Texas; Stokely: A Life, 2014, etc.), who has written widely on African American history, punctures the widespread myth that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X espoused diametrically opposed philosophies about ameliorating racism in the United States. “A mythology surrounds the legacies of Martin and Malcolm,” writes the author. “King is most comfortably portrayed as the nonviolent insider, while Malcolm is characterized as a by-any-means-necessary political renegade.” On the contrary, Joseph shows that although the two crusaders often disagreed about tactics, they began to appreciate each other as tacticians during the 1960s, as the civil rights movement began to gain traction during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and simultaneously grew increasingly violent at the local level. Because readers know that each man would eventually suffer an early, violent death, the narrative takes on a poignant urgency as the chapters unfold. While Malcolm was shot and killed in a public auditorium by assassins from the Nation of Islam, an organization led by self-proclaimed prophet Elijah Muhammad but effectively expanded by Malcolm before he split from the prophet, King was killed by a hatemongering white supremacist. Before chronicling the murders, Joseph sets the stage with solid biographical sections about the upbringings of both men. Malcolm grew up in a dysfunctional Midwestern family that fractured quickly, and he grew into a sometimes-violent teenage criminal who served nearly a decade in prison, where he became an autodidact. King grew up in a Southern family that had become part of the black elite, and unlike Malcolm, he received a doctorate and graduated from a respected theological seminary. As the author delineates the philosophies and tactics of each man, he compares and contrasts them on nearly every page, making the various narrative strands cohere nicely.
An authoritative dual biography from a leading scholar of African American history.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1786-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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