A readable stroll into the bad old days of Piss Christ and Jesse Helms—and guaranteed to make you dig up your Black Flag and...
The über-avuncular Ronald Reagan seems to be everyone’s favorite president these days. For those who were there at the time, this brief history of the ’80s serves as a reminder of a different man and mood.
Reagan promised a “nostalgic, flag-wrapped conservatism.” What he delivered made the country safe for Dick Cheney’s mean-spirited us-against-them view of the world, which had plenty of critics but few on-the-barricades opponents. Martin (History/Bryant Univ.; The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America, 2004) reminds us that there was plenty of oppositional politics during Reagan’s two terms, not principally on the floor of the Congress but instead courtesy of loosely knit alliances of environmentalists, feminists, liberals, leftists, progressives, civil-rights activists and antinuclear/antiwar types. These alliances, writes the author, largely “made possible the age of Obama.” ACT UP, for instance, alienated conservatives but drew needed attention to the AIDS crisis in the days when it was first emerging and was very little understood. Ultimately, its consciousness-raising even forced a formerly dismissive Reagan to acknowledge that the AIDS threat was real, and not just confined to the gay community. The antinuclear/antiwar community, from the women of Greenham Common in Britain to the Ground Zero activists here, brought such pressure to bear on both Reagan and the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev that arms-reduction talks were all but inevitable. Given that Reagan seems to have been inclined already to ending the spread of nuclear weapons, that assertion is debatable. Less arguable is the role that the widespread anti-apartheid movement in the United States, including corporate- and academic-divestiture campaigns, played in ending whites-only rule in South Africa.
A readable stroll into the bad old days of Piss Christ and Jesse Helms—and guaranteed to make you dig up your Black Flag and Minor Threat tapes.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-7461-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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