In this powerful debut, Skerritt (Journalism/Florida A&M Univ.) uses the stories of African-Americans living in an impoverished South Carolina community to reveal the hidden scourge of HIV/AIDS throughout South.
The author attributes the spread of AIDS among Southern heterosexuals to endemic rural poverty particularly among blacks, concomitant social breakdown— broken families, drug addiction, promiscuity and prostitution—and the scarcity of resources that would allow public-health measures adequate to stemming the epidemic. The author began covering the AIDS crisis in 2000, after hearing the Rev. Patricia Ann Starr preach. The pastor of a local evangelic Baptist church in York, S.C., she is known for her work helping people with the disease and is a vocal advocate of safe sex despite her disapproval of promiscuity. Until her own sister tested positive for the HIV virus and her neighbors began dying of AIDS, she—like many Americans—had believed the disease to be confined to gay men living in urban areas like Chicago and New York. Skerritt writes movingly of families caught up in this tragedy and the group of health professionals who do their best to deal with the crisis. He cites shocking statistics—while the incidence of AIDS deaths decreased throughout the U.S. between 2001 and 2005, the opposite is the case in the Deep South—but notes that most of the funds to fight the disease have been funneled to the large northern and western cities. Skerritt deplores the fact that liberal politicians such as Hillary Clinton focus on funding for their own constituencies to the disadvantage of the small rural communities that are now under the gun. The author makes a strong case that the shame is not with the dying but with those who turn away from the reality of this epidemic.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-814-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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