by C. Everett Koop ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1991
``Keep your head down and your mouth shut'' was advice given to the would-be Surgeon General early in his Washington days; fortunately, the high-profile and controversial Koop chose otherwise, both in his career and in these lively memoirs. The ``health conscience of America'' is how Koop says he'd like to be remembered—and he is that and much more: an innovative pediatric surgeon whose skills have altered thousands of lives, a man of scientific integrity whose tenure as Surgeon General alternately delighted and confounded both the right and the left, a Bible-reading evangelical Christian with a mission, and a bloody but unbowed veteran of eight years of Washington bureaucracy. His account of his early years, though pleasant enough, is unremarkable, but his writing moves into high gear when he talks about his years as a pediatric surgeon and the painful and prolonged process of becoming confirmed as Surgeon General. Koop recounts his battles with the powerful tobacco industry; his efforts to prod the Reagan Administration to take action in the war on AIDS and his subsequent attacks from the religious right on this same issue; his stand on the Baby Doe case and the rights of handicapped children; and, as expected, his opposition to abortion. Koop concludes with brief essays on what he considers major health issues of the day, such as health insurance, preventive health care, problems of aging, nutrition and food safety, drugs and alcohol, and domestic violence: Clearly much remains on his agenda. Good stories and honest opinions from an American original, who, though now stripped of his colorful vice admiral's uniform, is not about to fade away. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57626-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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