The conceit of the letter and the oddly intimate tone toward “Jimmy” make this a curious work, but it’s often insightful and...
A celebration of James Baldwin’s literature and legacy published in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of his death.
Written as an open letter to the late author and initially published in France in 2007, this book has been classified by the publisher as “literary memoir,” but it functions more as an elliptical biography. Like his literary idol, Mabanckou (French Literature/UCLA; Broken Glass, 2010, etc.) is an émigré to Paris and has spent plenty of time in the United States. But since he is an African, he brings a different perspective to themes of literary exile, race relations and the African diaspora than have Baldwin’s biographers (whom he cites liberally). He’s particularly incisive on the relationship between Baldwin and the stepfather who was much older than his mother, as Baldwin wrestled with issues of identity from childhood. His stepfather hated “white demons” and their culture with a virulence that the boy didn’t share and also instilled a harsh religiosity that his stepson would also reject. Yet James was himself “preaching from the age of fourteen,” and it was there that he became “aware of the power of the word,” with the biblical resonance that would inform so much of Baldwin’s work. Moving to France and openly acknowledging his homosexuality reinforced Baldwin’s sense of otherness, and he rebelled against such literary patriarchs as Richard Wright. “[I]dols are created in order to be destroyed,” he wrote of his rift with Wright. He also found himself at odds with the Black Power militants of the 1960s, with Eldridge Cleaver condemning him for “the most agonizing, complete hatred for Blacks.” Yet the novelist’s influence endures, and his imprint is even stronger in France, writes Mabanckou, who declares, “[i]f you return to this world, Jimmy, you will judge your homeland even more severely than you did when you were alive.”
The conceit of the letter and the oddly intimate tone toward “Jimmy” make this a curious work, but it’s often insightful and illuminating.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1593766016
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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