A sharp vision that challenges readers to shift perspective and examine conventional narratives.
A collection of essays that go wide and deep into the black experience in America.
As a former editor and columnist for the Washington Post and editor-in-chief of the NAACP’s The Crisis, Asim (A Taste of Honey, 2009, etc.) brings an impressive breadth of experience to these pieces. He places current events within the context of a legacy that is literary, political, and cultural as well as racial, with a voice that is both compelling and convincing. “In ideal circumstances, the human body flows in a state of strut,” he writes of the body confidence that white people too often find menacing in black males. “A jauntiness, an ease. A response to the rhythms that animate the earth….Strut is the body in motion, occupying, manipulating and moving through space. Strutting requires freedom, the liberty to flex and stretch.” This prose struts in an inherently musical way that also seems integral to the black experience as the author delineates its rhythms. Some of these pieces are more ambitious than others and pack more of a punch—particularly “Getting It Twisted” and “The Elements of Strut” as well as the concluding “Of Love and Struggle: The Limits of Respectability,” which counters Michelle Obama’s strategy of going high when they go low. Others are slighter, such as one on black representation in children’s literature, or more personal, like “Color Him Father,” about Asim’s family. Perhaps most problematic is the longest essay, “The Thing Itself,” which ultimately offers a nuanced illumination of cultural appropriation but spends too much space on the old battle over William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. Nonetheless, the author shows throughout how the past informs the present and how age-old fears and prejudices present themselves in new guises.
A sharp vision that challenges readers to shift perspective and examine conventional narratives.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17453-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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