Readers will sense that these hopeful passages are very early chapters in the young minister’s life story.
A distant descendent of the famous Confederate general wrestles with his family’s legacy.
Lee IV (Stained-Glass Millennials, 2017) terms this memoir “my letter of love to a place that has shaped me” while acknowledging that such love hasn’t always been reciprocated and that he is likely to rile those who resist the call to heal the region’s abundant racial wounds. The author caused a significant stir when he broadcast his views on racism in the Southern church, creating a controversy that spurred his resignation from the North Carolina church where he had been pastor, his first such assignment, in a town unaccustomed to such scrutiny. (One wonders if the national media attention would have been as bright without Lee’s name recognition.) After a foreword by the Rev. Bernice A. King, daughter of Martin, the author chronicles what it was like growing up in the South as a Lee, with a photo of the man they called “Uncle Bob” in his bedroom next to a Confederate flag. Though his parents were both progressive and pro-integration, he dealt with the mixed messages sent through his formative years with a black nanny, who would never sit at the table to eat a meal with him; his visits to Civil War memorials and battle re-enactments; and his realization that the man he had once idolized, and had been idolized throughout the region, had become “an idol of white supremacy…an idol of nationalism and of bigotry and of hate and of racism.” Things came to a head for the author, as they did for the nation, at Charlottesville in August 2017, where the battle over Confederate statues turned uglier and one woman lost her life. Lee received more calls to speak out, which caused him to lose his pulpit but gain a larger following.
Readers will sense that these hopeful passages are very early chapters in the young minister’s life story.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57638-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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