A finely argued contribution to the discussion of immigration, its decidedly scholarly bent notwithstanding.
A scholarly exercise imparting astute observations about the reception of immigrants and their enormous contributions to their adopted society.
Taking four very different “foreigners” in America, Ritivoi (English/Carnegie Mellon Univ.; Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory, 2006, etc.) delineates how each challenged the prevailing political discourse and even changed it for the better. In spite of the criticism and suspicion surrounding their “foreignness”—Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse came from Germany, Alexander Solzhenitsyn from Russia, all three struggled with English, while Edward Said attended Harvard and inherited his Palestinian father’s U.S. citizenship—these four intellectuals had a profound, even prophetic effect on the “citizen ethos” that never quite accepted them. The four used what Ritivoi calls their “stranger persona” to generate original ideas and impart the vision of an impartial observer, desperately lacking in the rather closed-minded, self-congratulatory society that America had become after World War II. Although foreigners were welcomed as part of the founding myth of the country, and accepted, like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, as “enlightened travelers,” the intellectuals who were forced here by oppression in their own countries were viewed with suspicion, considered arrogant and “undesirable.” Yet these four immigrants did not hesitate to use certain effective rhetorical devices in their writings to counter these tenacious “habits of exclusion." For example, Arendt employed irony in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to unsettle notions of sentimental patriotism; Marcuse used his revolutionary notoriety to forge political activism; Solzhenitsyn found in the jeremiad of his 1978 Harvard commencement address the vehicle with which to urge America to return to its founding greatness; Said used denunciation in Orientalism and elsewhere to underscore the hypocrisy of Western liberalism.
A finely argued contribution to the discussion of immigration, its decidedly scholarly bent notwithstanding.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16868-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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