The first full-dress biography of Bunche—and one that brings to life the many achievements of a remarkable diplomat. Drawing on access to Bunche's private papers and to knowledge gained during his stint as Bunche's assistant at the UN, Urquhart (A Life in Peace and War, 1987; Hammarskjold, 1972) offers a nuanced portrait of an exceptional man who began as a militant critic of white America and ended as a member of its establishment. Bunche, the grandson of a former slave, graduated from UCLA in 1927, earned a doctorate at Harvard, and helped Gunnar Myrdal research his landmark study, An American Dilemma. During WW II, the future UN undersecretary general served with the OSS, moving in 1944 to the State Department, where—in his capacity as head of the section dealing with colonial affairs—he participated in the founding of the UN and the drafting of its charter. In the wake of his appointment to the UN Secretariat, Bunche negotiated the 1949 armistice between Israel and its Arab neighbors, a feat that won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. As the secretary-general's chief troubleshooter, he directed missions to defuse the Suez, Congo, Cyprus, and other crises. Though a world-class statesmen widely esteemed for his mediation talents, the globe-trotting Bunche (who died in 1971 at age 67) remained a second-class citizen subject to racial discrimination in the US—where he was visibly, if judiciously, active in the civil-rights movement. Throughout, Urquhart provides perceptive accounts of Bunche's many appearances on the international stage, plus valuable perspectives on his relations with a close-knit family. As additional archival material becomes available, scholars will no doubt pay closer attention to Bunche's extraordinary accomplishments as a peacemaker. But be that as it may, Urquhart's scrupulously documented, wide-angle narrative bids fair to become a standard reference on the man. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03527-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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