by Austin Channing Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2018
A powerful and necessarily uncomfortable text lacking suggestions for a path forward.
The impassioned story of one woman’s journey into activism.
Brown’s book is part memoir and part jeremiad against American whiteness. She begins by describing her youth in a largely white neighborhood of Toledo. After her parents’ divorce, she went on to discover black culture, and affirm her own identity, in an African-American Cleveland neighborhood and, especially, in a black church. Through high school and then into college, Brown learned more about black history and culture and became more involved with racial reconciliation efforts. She especially saw herself as a possible bridge between black and white cultures. Most of her work has been through churches and progressive Christian organizations, but faith plays only a minor role in this book. The focus of the narrative is on the author’s recognition of—and fight against—“America’s commitment to violent, abusive, exploitative, immoral white supremacy, which seeks the absolute control of Black bodies.” Brown pulls no punches as she lambasts white culture for being, even at its most liberal, myopic and self-serving. She argues that “white fragility” and “white guilt” are ways in which whites absolve themselves of inherent racism. Discussing whites who, after her presentations on racism, confess to her their own racist opinions and actions, she points out that she cannot “offer absolution….I am not a priest for the white soul.” Throughout the book, the author writes with raw emotion and candid self-reflection. “I have become very intimate with anger,” she writes. Brown’s work will resonate with other activists of color, though it provides little direction for others. The author is clear that racism and white supremacy are here to stay and that even attempts to educate and enlighten are rarely fruitful. “I underestimated the enduring power, the lethal imagination, the desire for blood of white supremacy,” she writes. And later: “hope for me has died one thousand deaths.”
A powerful and necessarily uncomfortable text lacking suggestions for a path forward.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6085-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
More by Austin Channing Brown
BOOK REVIEW
by Austin Channing Brown with Andrea Williams
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
19
Our Verdict
GET IT
Google Rating
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.