A life that encapsulates American progressivism over the past half-century in both its strengths and weaknesses—and who...
Human-rights partisan Neier (War Crimes, 1998) looks back over a career working with the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Institute, and the Soros Foundation.
The author treats readers to his personal forays into the politics of the age, from the kindling of SDS (though he fled that group even before the Port Huron Statement) to his stints at the helms of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. The years 1963–93 were eventful ones in the struggle for civil and political rights, and Neier explains his and his organizations’ positions on everything from abortion rights, fighting the compulsory commitment of drug addicts (he concludes that deinstitutionalization was “a civil liberties success but . . . a social policy failure”), to struggles against gerrymandering and for the right of the Skokie Klan members to voice their beliefs. Much of Neier’s later work involved monitoring violations in armed conflicts: “My most significant contribution to the protection of human rights,” he believes, though one might argue that the vibrancy of the organizations he nominally headed could take that honor. Neier’s style does not here match his substance; in what might generously be referred to as flat prose, a lawyerly precision trumps obvious storytelling possibilities, and there haven’t been this many references to Trotskyites, Schachtmanites, and other “ites” since disgruntled Cold War leftists stopped hurling insults at each other. It’s sometimes possible to fault Neier on content as well: he makes a legitimate point in distinguishing between the universality of human rights versus the particularity of economic rights, but he fails to persuade when he says that the very notion of economic rights “is based on the view that the allocation of resources may not be entrusted to the institutions and processes through which democratic will is exercised.”
A life that encapsulates American progressivism over the past half-century in both its strengths and weaknesses—and who would argue against the fight to safeguard human civil and political rights?Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-891620-82-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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