Tragedy, adventure, romance and scholarly investigation come together like pioneers to a boomtown, with something for Earp...
From the dusty trails of the Old West emerges the story that Wyatt Earp’s wife never wanted told: her own.
A simple question from a friend about why Earp was buried in a Jewish cemetery prompted Kirschner (Dean of Macaulay Honors College at CUNY; Sala’s Gift: My Mother’s Holocaust Story, 2006) to uncover the truth of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, the fourth wife and most constant companion of the famed frontier hero. The author mines letters, archives and manuscripts to tell Josephine’s story, panning for gold in a very muddy family history. After the showdown at the O.K. Corral and long before his death, newspapers and local lore had already made a legend of Wyatt and his family, with plenty of controversy and inconsistencies to fuel it further. To make matters more complicated, beautiful and theatrical Josephine was hard at work on her own self-made myth, burying her poor, Jewish origins and obscuring the more tragic, scandalous and, consequently, interesting periods of her life. From Tombstone to Nome to Los Angeles, Josephine created a maze of challenges for her future biographers, all of which Kirschner handles skillfully. Even with all of the rootless couple’s many adventures to recount, nearly half the book is an untangling of the drama that began just a few years before Wyatt’s death in 1929 and continued through the rest of Josephine’s life and into the next century. With vividness and certainty, Kirschner lays her story to rest at last.
Tragedy, adventure, romance and scholarly investigation come together like pioneers to a boomtown, with something for Earp worshipers and casual readers alike.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-186450-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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