A disturbing but necessary book.
An investigative reporter sheds light on a shocking decadeslong sex scandal at a prestigious New York prep school.
Kamil was a proud Horace Mann graduate. For him and the friends he made at the school, it was “a unique, life-forging experience…[that] had made [them] who [they] were.” But when they reunited a few years after they graduated from college and began comparing notes about their experiences at Horace Mann, an unsettling pattern begin to emerge. Almost everyone in the group had endured some form of sexual harassment and/or abuse, including rape. At the time, no one thought to explore these stories further. But 20 years later, in the shadow of the 2011 Jerry Sandusky Penn State football sex scandal, Kamil realized that justice needed to be done. So he began reaching out to other Horace Mann graduates and eventually published an article called “Prep School Predators” in the New York Times Magazine on June 10, 2012. The piece received more than 1,000 online comments, many of which came from sex abuse survivors. Former students began demanding that Horace Mann take responsibility for the actions of the nearly two-dozen teachers implicated in a scandal that took place over more than 30 years. Despite credible testimonies, media exposure, and eventual legal action, the school, which boasted “some of the world’s richest alumni,” managed to settle with the plaintiffs involved in the lawsuit against it for “pennies on the dollar.” Although two members of the Horace Mann board of directors went on to form a charity to help survivors pay for therapy services, the school itself never fully acknowledged it was at fault and never pursued the independent investigation to bring closure to a painful episode. To Kamil’s credit, he never attacks his alma mater for its handling of the sex scandal, but he uses his narrative to bring truth out of darkness and let it prevail, just as it does in the words of Horace Mann’s school song.
A disturbing but necessary book.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-16662-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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