This is no hagiography, but rather a portrait of a truly human character trying to effect change while battling private...
A tightly packed biography of “labor’s lyrical lawyer” and civil-liberties advocate.
In pursuing Darrow’s lifetime (1857–1938) of passionate public service, Kersten (History and Labor Studies/Univ. of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Labor’s Home Front: The American Federation of Labor during World War II, 2006, etc.) is mostly forgiving of his subject’s foibles—for example, his ends-justifies-the-means approach that tested friends’ loyalties and got him indicted for attempted bribery of a juror in the 1911 Los Angeles Times bombing case. Darrow was driven to address the inequity between rich and poor, no doubt influenced by his activist parents among a big family in Kinsman, Ohio. Darrow was a teacher before he was drawn to study law, which promised riches and fame. Moving from the small town to Chicago changed his life, both by introducing him to Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and immersion into Democratic politics. From his work as a lawyer for the Chicago North Western Railroad, he was jolted by the Pullman strike of 1894, organized by Eugene Debs; he joined the defense of the railway strikers to fight what he believed was a pernicious conspiracy “against the Constitution and the laws and the liberties of the people.” His first few defeats were shattering and public, tempered resounding triumphs like the trial of the Oshkosh sawmill unionists in 1898, the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission of 1904 and defense of “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners in 1907. His life was often in shambles—two troubled marriages, a lack of money, ill health—but Darrow was also remarkably resilient until a late age, making stump speeches for the Allies during World War I and defending evolution in the notorious Scopes trial of 1925. Kersten explodes Darrow’s messy, complicated life, and concludes with a helpful bibliographic essay for students.
This is no hagiography, but rather a portrait of a truly human character trying to effect change while battling private demons.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9486-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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