An important one.
He was called Malcolm Little at birth; he was buried as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz; but he lived most of his life as Malcolm X and was the most rabid racist of his time while he ran counter to the movement which dominated it.
As he said over the cups of coffee cum cream he drank with Alex Haley (who took down this story and contributes a long epilogue), it "was the only thing I like integrated" His father was one of six out of seven boys who died violently (predominantly at white hands). Malcolm X never doubted for a minute that he would be assassinated, just as he was. His mother was committed to a state mental hospital—"legal modern slavery." He was farmed out and by the time he was sixteen had been schooled to the hard fact that "everything in life is a hustle." "Sharp" by this time, he came to New York, to Harlem, where he steered white women to black men, stole, took cocaine, and learned the "cesspool morals of the white man from the best possible source, from his own women." Sent to prison at twenty one, he found Allah, the religion of Islam and Elijah Muhammad there. Once out, he became one of Muhammad's most militant disciples and seared his way across the national scene. Interestingly enough, it was after Muhammad "silenced" him, i.e, suspended him from the movement, that he went to the original Holy City and the Holy Land and became more aware of the possibility of white and black "oneness" Handler's introduction and Haley's personal commentary at the close present the "black panther" coiled to spring in somewhat softer focus although his intemperate hatred justified to some extent by the circumstances of his early life) and lashing zealotry fire the book from beginning to end. Particularly in its view of the rough underside of Harlem does the record have a revelatory as well as testamentary impact.
An important one.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1965
ISBN: 0141185430
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1965
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 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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