Cuts through the murk and blarney to suggestively analyze a curious figure. (31 illustrations, 3 maps)
Sensible portrait of Deborah Sampson, a.k.a. Robert Shurtliff, soldier in the American Revolution.
Sampson wasn’t the first woman to try to pass as a man to gain entry into the Continental Army, but she was the most successful, writes Young (History Emeritus/Northern Illinois Univ.; The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, not reviewed). Not only did she serve for an impressive 17 months, but she was neither thrown in jail nor drummed out of town to the tune of the “whore’s march.” (This, Young suggests, may have been because she wasn’t looking for a husband and had been wounded in battle.) But what was she doing masquerading as a soldier? The author turns for enlightenment to a memoir Sampson wrote with the florid aid of Herman Mann, deciphering what he can of the true story from Mann’s obvious and not-so-obvious embellishments. Young comes at the memoir from an angle, looking for slender clues, details, and corroboration, trying to match them up against other oral histories. His tone is humble, knowing full well he is on sketchy ground, but the toeholds he finds for his ideas are solid. These range from the spirit of disguise that was loose on the land (remember the Boston Tea Party?) to the plebian tradition of warrior women, from the scant prospects of a former indentured servant to Sampson’s defiant, rebellious nature. She was that “ultimate threat: a woman ‘who wore the breeches.’ ” All of this comes out as Young charts Sampson’s early life, her years of notoriety, and her demands for veterans’ pension, pointing to the paradox of this iconoclast flirting with conformity within her nonconformity. Sampson was a model soldier, she married, she even apologized.
Cuts through the murk and blarney to suggestively analyze a curious figure. (31 illustrations, 3 maps)Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-44165-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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