An engaging picture of a life that was, in itself, a miracle.
The rags-to-respect story of a Haitian-born slave whose emigration to NYC unfolded a lifetime of good works in the name of faith that now prompt proposals to make him the first black American Catholic saint.
Not all Haitian slaves were even baptized, National Catholic Reporter editor Jones reports, since France sent only four priests to minister to tens of thousands in the colony then called Saint Domingue. Fleeing British invaders, a slave revolt, and yellow fever, the Bérard family left their plantation and moved to New York in 1797, bringing with them a contingent of slaves that included the teenaged Pierre Toussaint. Practicing Catholics had been banned from New York until the mid–18th century, and Protestant bias was still rampant, the author reminds us, so Toussaint had a “fourth strike” to overcome in addition to his race, slave status, and inability to speak English. (Jones does not, however, gloss over the fact that Mother Church turned a blind eye to slavery.) Pierre was apprenticed to a hairdresser and in short order became known among some of the city’s best families as an expert coiffeur who was also well mannered and discreet. Income flowed; Toussaint bought his sister’s freedom and helped liberate other blacks, although he remained a slave himself until manumitted by his owner’s widow on her deathbed in 1807. He married, adopted an orphaned niece, and became active in raising funds for New York City’s first orphanage and first cathedral. The Great Fire of 1835 wiped out a small fortune that personal industry and judicious investments had garnered, ending Toussaint’s plan to retire in Paris, Jones surmises. But he remained active in charities and black causes for the rest of his life. Focusing on his subject’s activities, the author gives only peripheral mention to the ongoing process of Toussaint’s canonization.
An engaging picture of a life that was, in itself, a miracle.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-49994-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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