An honest, searching book sure to tread on the toes of supremacists and iconoclasts alike.
Virginia-based writer and teacher/historian Cleary takes on a thorny modern issue: How do we commemorate those dead who fought for the Confederates?
Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson spent a decade teaching at Virginia Military Institute, a job for which he was perhaps not entirely suited. “Then suddenly, with the war,” writes the author, “he came into his own: commanding, organizing, fighting.” Beloved of his soldiers and honored by foe Ulysses S. Grant as “a gallant soldier and Christian gentleman,” he fought doggedly for the Confederate cause in what he called “our second War of Independence” while, as Cleary notes, never apologizing for or openly supporting slavery. (Jackson did, however, own six slaves.) The author’s investigation into Jackson’s life and times begins with our own, with a Virginia monument that park rangers called “Stonewall on steroids,” which was sculpted just before World War II and has the feel of an anti-Axis superhero. While an antihero to many, Jackson is revered in the South, especially among Virginians. On that score, Cleary gamely recalls a showdown with a New York academic who disparaged Southern boorishness: “My assertion that I was a Virginian—which to a southerner would have stopped her diatribe immediately—did nothing to check the flow.” Yet, of course, that New Yorker had a point to make. Furthermore, writes the author, who spent many years teaching mostly African American students in the juvenile justice system and laments the “consequences of poverty and neglect, the legacy of the slavery that Johnson was fighting to defend,” that point needs to be heard out in Southern quarters. Cleary, who observes that “interest in the Civil War is a middle-aged white guy kind of thing,” is both sensitive and sensible, and readers along the way will learn both of Jackson’s gallantry and the essential wrongness of the enterprise for which he died.
An honest, searching book sure to tread on the toes of supremacists and iconoclasts alike.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3580-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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