Readers might feel regret for not having the privilege of meeting Angelou personally, but Smiley has faithfully re-created...
Veteran talk show host Smiley (Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year, 2014, etc.) chronicles his relationship with Maya Angelou (1928-2014), his intellectual and spiritual guide.
The author recounts how, as an eager and insecure young man, he was in awe of the multitalented woman who "dispens[ed] love with such natural and joyful ease…[it] drew people to her.” Dr. Angelou gently scolded Smiley for his "idolatrous attitude,” yet he writes about her with such fascination and awe it approaches hagiography. The woman he came to call "Mother Maya" (she affectionately called him "young Tavis Smiley") was his Buddha: a teacher, a wise elder, and a gentle corrector of his behavior, thoughts, and perspective. He remained a student at her feet, though some readers might regard him as overly fawning. Smiley wisely shapes what he learned from Angelou in the form of conversations they had over decades. The resulting narrative, comprised of Angelou’s words as speeches, stories, and lectures, appropriately keeps the focus on the woman and her teachings rather than Smiley’s own (impressive) credentials. To his credit, he shares Angelou's criticism of his BET interview show—that he's very prepared and informed but also too eager to speak and not a good listener. Here, Smiley proves to be a faithful recorder of Angelou’s poise, compassion, and dignity. Throughout, he illustrates how Angelou regularly combined practicality and spirituality. “Her practical advice—be assertive, not aggressive,” writes the author. “Her spiritual advice—be yourself.”
Readers might feel regret for not having the privilege of meeting Angelou personally, but Smiley has faithfully re-created both her voice's "haunting beauty and lilting musicality" and the experience of receiving her transformative wisdom, humor, and compassion.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-34175-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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