by Allegra di Bonaventura ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2013
Although the scholarship is stellar, readers may yearn for more attitude and animation from the author.
A scholarly study of the interactions among families—from wealthy landowners to impecunious African and Indian slaves—in New London, Conn., in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Di Bonaventura, an assistant dean (Graduate School of Arts and Science/Yale Univ.), debuts with this adaptation of her doctoral dissertation, and it retains the strengths and weaknesses of that type of writing. Her research is thorough and imaginative. Although much of the story rests on the diary of Joshua Hempstead—a diary he kept assiduously for 47 years—di Bonaventura also explores other significant primary documents from churches and various civic and private archives, integrating the work of other historians of the region and time. The titular “Adam”—Adam Jackson—was a black slave whom Hempstead—a shipwright, farmer and respected local citizen—purchased when his sons were beginning to move on to form their own families. Virtually all of what we know about Jackson’s time with the Hempsteads comes from the slave owner’s diary, but di Bonaventura uses inference and documentary sources to flesh out his story of long, dutiful servitude. She also interweaves the stories of Jackson’s family with those of other significant families—e.g., the Livingstons, the Rogers and the Winthrops. Throughout the relevant decades, these families interacted in various ways—in church, public forums, courtrooms, etc. Di Bonaventura offers some gripping stories—notably, John Jackson’s (Adam’s father) fierce attempts to keep his family together, poor Mary Livingston’s losing battle with cancer and the nasty nature of John Winthrop IV. The author pauses occasionally to instruct us about the importance of stone and wood, the legal system, Indian tribes, shipbuilding, the Great Awakenings and much more. Her voice remains generally detached and scholarly throughout.
Although the scholarship is stellar, readers may yearn for more attitude and animation from the author.Pub Date: April 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87140-430-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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