Its matter-of-factness and homely detail make Miller’s memoir a powerful reminder of what “separate but equal” really meant...
An African-American’s revealing recollections of growing up in the small South Carolina town of Orangeburg before and during the Great Depression.
Miller, a poet and teacher, opens with an account of the episode that ended his stay in the South, when at age 19 he composed the note that became his ticket to exile. Accompanying each chapter is a poem, usually brief, straightforward and drawn from personal experience. The first one, “Illumination,” is about the time he passed a note to a white girl that read, “I would like to get to know you better.” For this disregard for the niceties of Jim Crow laws, Miller was charged with attempted rape. The final chapter, in which he is smuggled out of town and banished to New York, ends with a poem reflecting on what didn’t happen and what might have been. Between are 11 chapters and 11 poems, all of which show in unsparing detail what life was like for a poor black boy growing up in the rural, segregated South. When a neighbor saw him walking to school barefoot in winter and bought him a pair of second-hand shoes for 75 cents, the incident becomes a poem, as do his memories of helping his mother wash other people’s clothes by hand and his encounter with Shorty the Iceman, who hired but didn’t pay the author for delivering ice one summer. Miller’s wretched poverty was worsened by racism. Barred from the town’s public library, he found books at a local state-college library; barred from the town swimming pool, he swam in the river. Another of many humiliations he was forced endure in the name of segregation was the division of the bathrooms in the local movie theater: one for white men, one for white “ladies” and one for “Coloreds.”
Its matter-of-factness and homely detail make Miller’s memoir a powerful reminder of what “separate but equal” really meant in the days before the Civil Rights Act.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59714-065-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Heyday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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 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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