A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.
Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s “Back to Africa” movement.
BBC radio producer Grant, himself the son of Caribbean immigrants, delivers a spellbinding portrait of Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), a printer who mobilized millions through his creation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey’s program of racial pride and economic uplift proposed an exodus of black people from the United States, the Caribbean and Central America to a colony in Liberia. Operating mainly from Harlem, he saw his dream of a thriving African homeland for blacks collapse in 1923 after he was convicted of mail fraud, an offense for which he later served a two-year prison sentence. Disgraced, dispirited and largely forgotten by the adoring throngs who once invested in his Black Star shipping line and other self-help business enterprises, the colorful self-styled “President-King” of Africa endured the agony of reading premature (and often vicious) obituaries published long before his death in London at age 52. The author notes that he was drawn to the myth and mystery of Garvey after accompanying his mother on a trip to her native Jamaica. Grant’s learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page, but that doesn’t prevent him from delivering a clear-eyed portrait of a man whose genuine commitment to bettering the lives of blacks was compromised by an outsized ego, a penchant for pageantry and unbridled disdain for mainstream crusaders such as NAACP leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Instead, Grant reveals, Garvey publicly and proudly claimed an ally in the Ku Klux Klan’s Imperial Wizard, who naturally cheered his “Back to Africa” scheme.
A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-19-536794-2
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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