Younger readers who weren’t around during the Vietnam protest era will still feel like they’re missing something.
An overblown yet oddly sketchy memoir recalling Ayers’s days in the Weather Underground.
A spin-off of the leftist, antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weather Underground was formed in the late 1960s by a few hundred militant college students who became notorious as bombers after blowing up a policeman’s statue in Chicago and a bathroom in the Pentagon. They also induced violent riots and masterminded Timothy Leary’s prison escape. Members rationalized their terrorism in revolutionary terms. As Ayers tells it, “I was a full-time peace activist . . . our future existence hung in the balance. It fell to us—and we were just kids—to save the world.” Ayers captivates with heartfelt recollections of his friends in the Black Panthers, feminist groups, and Vietnam, attesting to his sincere wish to create a better world. Unfortunately, his passion cripples his credibility; he spends more time divulging emotions than describing his participation in terrorist acts, leaving us to wonder what actions he took and how effective they were. Much of this riveting American history is conveyed in rambling exposition that at its best moments has a Kerouac-like looseness, but more frequently denies significant characters and events the depth they deserve. Ayers’s memories are selective to the point of incomprehensibility. He goes on and on about his affair with “Diana,” later killed during an accidental explosion in a Weather Underground bomb factory, without bothering to mention her last name. (It was Oughton.) When he first meets SDS leader Bernadine Dohrn, she’s got a boyfriend Ayers finds intimidating; the next thing we know Bill and Bernadine are living together, with no explanation of where the boyfriend went. Although his fast-paced chronicle is at times explosive, Ayers too often rushes past intimate details and simply lists events rather than reenacting them in real time.
Younger readers who weren’t around during the Vietnam protest era will still feel like they’re missing something.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8070-7124-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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