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
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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