Assiduous research and clear prose give Murray her due.
A cradle-to-grave account about one of the most interesting, accomplished, and controversial figures in 20th-century America who is far too little known.
Pauli Murray (1910-1985), who fought valiantly against Jim Crow prejudice, came to be known as “Jane Crow” due to her mixed-race heritage, her female gender, and her own perception of herself as transgender. As Rosenberg (Emerita, History/Barnard Coll.; Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think About Sex and Politics, 2004, etc.) shows, Murray, never at ease psychologically, descended from a long line of mentally ill family members, and orphaned early—her father was murdered, and her mother was rendered frail by repeated childbirth—overcame countless obstacles throughout her life. She left her racially charged North Carolina home to earn a college degree in New York City, bounced back from being rejected for graduate studies at the University of North Carolina because of her part-black heritage (even though her white great-great-grandfather had served on the governing board there), graduated from Howard University Law School, and began influencing public policy outside academia. Murray’s work on discrimination influenced lawyers and judges to desegregate public schools, protect the constitutional rights of women, and move toward protecting other minorities as well. She considered herself queer in terms of sexuality, often dressing so that distinguishing her gender proved difficult; in terms of gay and queer rights in general, she was clearly way ahead of her time. Later in life, Murray inspired Betty Friedan and others to co-found the National Organization for Women, smashed academic barriers at Brandeis University, and earned ordination in the Episcopal Church as the first female black priest. One of Rosenberg’s most fascinating extended anecdotes illuminates Murray’s struggle to write and publish her 1956 memoir, Proud Shoes. She gained attention as a memoirist around the same time that Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were also breaking racial and class barriers as authors.
Assiduous research and clear prose give Murray her due.Pub Date: April 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-065645-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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