A brave, heart-rending narrative from the parents who lost their son far too soon.
The parents of Trayvon Martin (1995-2012) tell their sides of the story about his death.
In alternating points of view, Fulton and Martin narrate the events leading up to their son’s death, the trial, and the aftermath. The book is filled with the heartache and anguish only parents who have lost a child can fully understand, as the authors delve into the nitty-gritty details of what it was like to learn of their son’s death, the terrible, nightmarish quality of the days and weeks following the shooting, and the experience of going to trial only to have the killer proclaimed not guilty. They share family stories and anecdotes about Trayvon, giving readers a rounded, more complete picture of the teenager who was gunned down by a neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, on a rainy night in 2012. Their son’s death provoked anger across the country and contributed to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement, but as Fulton points out, the violence and deaths of African-Americans has hardly stopped after Trayvon. “We tell this story in the hope that it will continue the calling that Trayvon left for us to answer and that it might shine a path for others who have lost, or will lose, children to senseless violence. We tell it in the hope for healing, for bridging the divide that separates America, between races and classes, between citizens and the police,” writes the author. “Most of all, we tell it for Trayvon, whose young soul and lively spirit guide us every day in everything we do.” Fulton and Martin are not heavy-handed on the dramatics; they speak honestly and boldly and win empathy and understanding through their expression of their bleak reality. The authors also provide answers not readily found in the avalanche of news covering this story, and the book should foster further discussions on the issues of race and violence in America.
A brave, heart-rending narrative from the parents who lost their son far too soon.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9723-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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