Celebrates with notes of grace and passion the courage of people who acted on the Declaration of Independence’s words about...
Thirteen heart-gladdening tales of love on the run in the time of slavery, assembled by award-winning journalist De Ramus.
Not that they all ended happily; many of the lovers will die in these pages. But this impressive debut collection awes us with its stories of slave-era couples, many black, some interracial, who defied mobs and hounds and bounty hunters and taboos to maintain their relationships. De Ramus scoured Civil War, historical society, and court records, unpublished memoirs, and the remembrances of runaway slave couples to gather these stories of abiding affection, and it is not hard to understand why they have endured. These men and women possess a sinewy, breathtaking faith in the success of such acts as hiding out in a sailor’s chest for a few days—easy to say, but rather difficult to thoroughly imagine, especially when you consider that the people in the trunks were upside-down much of the time—or sprinkling cayenne pepper on shoes to distract the trackers’ dogs, or posing in the capes and top hats of southern gents (if your skin color allowed), or riding as a fugitive on the night transport of the Underground Railroad. De Ramus, once a Pulitzer Prize finalist, has a bold voice, flowing with admiration and dramatic in its scene setting, that serves the stories well. The author supplements these energetic narratives with historical background on the Promised Land of Canada, which had its own prejudices against blacks, and the Underground Railroad, which also had its downside: “ . . . only a small band of citizens actually aided slaves, and not all of them welcomed blacks into their homes or even churches except in segregated ‘negro seats.’ ” Once escaped, De Ramus notes, these former slaves didn’t simply hide out, but often started schools and whole communities to aid freed blacks.
Celebrates with notes of grace and passion the courage of people who acted on the Declaration of Independence’s words about being created equal and pursuing happiness. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-8263-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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