An African-American woman, a child of the '60s, recalls growing up poor on Chicago's South Side, attending Yale as an affirmative-action beneficiary, and taking her knocks en route to an understanding of the world and her role in it. Critical of recent changes in welfare that would prohibit the kind of good fortune she received, Bray, whose father spent more time gambling and fighting with his wife than he did working, and whose proud mother took welfare to make ends meet, says she has written this book to show the good that could happen under the welfare system of the '60s. She describes the frustrations of being poor—an early reader who later, with her mother's assistance, took titles home from the library, she would also become a petty thief, pilfering bills from carelessly left wallets at school, until she was caught. At Yale, her personal style of ``unadorned feminism'' was ``anathema.'' Work as a reporter at a Connecticut daily led soon enough to a New York publishing career and conflicts with egotistical male editors. She found herself living in Harlem in the go-go '80s, working for several publications before landing a dream job at the New York Times Book Review. In the closing section Bray speaks out against the demonization of welfare recipients inherent in the dialogue surrounding the 1996 welfare bill. Writes Bray, ``I was not a wolf, or an alligator, or a mistake, or an affront.'' The bill, she says, substitutes social Darwinism for democratic and religious values like compassion and protection of the vulnerable. Bray is an eloquent and perhaps surprising voice for the generation of welfare recipients that has come of age since the '60s. As her affecting story reflects, her accomplishment is an achievement not so much of material progress but of the intellect— a contribution to cultural understanding. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-42555-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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.
