A cogently narrated personal exploration of the pain of raising black boys in a society that the author sees as fearing black men and indifferent to their survival. In the face of chilling statistics (the leading cause of death among American black males under 21 is homicide), novelist Golden (Creative Writing/George Mason Univ.; ed. Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues, 1993, etc.) examines her tumultuous experience raising her son, Michael. She begins motherhood in Nigeria, having moved there to be with her Nigerian-born husband, Femi, and his family. But as an educated woman and a feminist, she is unable to reconcile her love of Femi's caring, tribal community with its treatment of women. She also struggles with Femi's own unwillingness to see their marriage as an equal partnership, and after a year she leaves him. After returning to the United States, Golden grapples with the painful realization that, while as a woman her options are much better in the US than in Nigeria, her son's status is far more precarious in her native country. In that context, she explores her decisions to send him away from the violence of Washington, D.C., to a boarding school outside Philadelphia, and to encourage his relationship with his Nigerian father, first through letters and early-morning international phone calls, and eventually through a visit to Africa. Occasionally, Golden descends to easy polemics about race in America, which overwhelms the specificity of her own narrative and her personal experiences of grief and fear. But for the most part, she admirably navigates between the intimate and the sociological. Though her prose is not always engaging or original, Golden brings an articulate and much-needed perspective to the current feminist discourse on raising sons and to the issue of the ``endangered'' black male.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47302-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
