A fine contribution to the literature of civil rights and the African American experience.
An alumnus of the Harvard class of 1963 recounts an experiment in affirmative action and its lasting effects.
Before 1959, the African American presence at Harvard was minimal to the point of being practically nonexistent. That year, the university recruited 18 young black men—women did not yet enter into the picture—one of them Garrett, who went on to excel in TV news and documentary-making. “I was by no means the first Black at Harvard,” he writes. “That was Richard Theodore Greener, who graduated in 1870. From then until the mid-twentieth century, there were sometimes one or two in a class, and often none.” The other 17 men were just as capable. In a kind of modern rejoinder to Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky’s What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? Garrett traces their lives and careers. All acknowledge that a Harvard education had its uses, but most also allow that during their student years, they kept quiet and did their work, careful not to give any reason to be forced out. Some of the former students are expatriates, having found other countries more congenial than the still racially troubled United States. One gentleman who has long lived in Austria after a career at IBM remembers going to student mixers and having classmates rush out to find a black girl for him to dance with: “There we were, the two of us, and all these whites just standing there glowing, saying ‘Isn’t it great?’ It was very embarrassing for her and for me.” Rueful reminiscence sometimes shades into anger, but for the most part, these extraordinary men chart life journeys that were full of challenges—as with a closeted gay classmate who went on to careers in the aerospace, banking, and advertising sectors—but also full of accomplishments. Garrett writes with an easy, charming style (“In the spring of 1962, I was still trying to climb the steep and slippery slope of organic chemistry”), but the sense of injustice is palpable.
A fine contribution to the literature of civil rights and the African American experience.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-87997-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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