Essential for anyone interested in racial issues and the history of American filmmaking; a well researched, passionately...
The frankly amazing story of the black D.W. Griffith.
Biographer McGilligan (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness, 2003, etc.) gives a fascinating account of the eventful life of Oscar Micheaux, the first significant African-American filmmaker, a Promethean figure whose current relative obscurity is nothing short of baffling. Micheaux, the child of former slaves, exhibited unusual ambition and determination from a young age, leaving his home of Great Bend, Kan., while still a teenager to work as a Pullman porter. A handsome, intelligent, well-read young man (he inherited a reverence for education and the tenets of Booker T. Washington from his mother), Micheaux moved easily across the racial divide, striking up friendships with white passengers and engaging them in long conversations about the world beyond his own experience. Micheaux appreciated the relatively good money, travel and prestige afforded by his job with Pullman, but was sickened by the required servility and the graft that was endemic in the profession. He made the astonishing decision to go west and join the ranks of thousands of hopeful homesteaders—overwhelmingly white—and establish a farming concern in South Dakota. He succeeded in this venture, and in winning over his curious white neighbors. These experiences provided grist for his many novels and groundbreaking films, unprecedented in their translation of the American black experience to the screen. How did a self-made black farmer come to publish novels and direct movies in 1919? For the ever-industrious Micheaux, the answer was simple: Create your own publishing and film-production companies. The filmmaker comes vividly to life in McGilligan’s narrative, as the author quotes copiously from Micheaux’s letters and autobiographical works, revealing the optimism, erudition, insight and flashes of self-deprecating wit behind his mind-boggling accomplishments and dizzyingly complicated personal life.
Essential for anyone interested in racial issues and the history of American filmmaking; a well researched, passionately felt and endlessly fascinating look at a singular American life.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-073139-7
Page Count: 392
Publisher: HC/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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