A bit like an overlong home movie.
Adoring biography of a pioneering African-American businessman from his niece and grandniece.
Birmingham, Alabama, was a tough city to grow up in if you were a young black man in the early 1900s, but according to former TV anchorwoman Jenkins and her daughter Hines, A.G. Gaston managed to thrive during the majority of his 103 years there. He made it through tenth grade, worked at a variety of difficult jobs, including a stint in the iron mines, then served in WWI. Back home he found “few opportunities and ample disdain,” until opening his lunchbox one day in the mine prompted a business epiphany. His mother’s fried chicken was so good that fellow workers clamored to share it, so Gaston started a little lunch business. The authors go on to extol their forebear’s business acumen, noting that while some might label him an opportunist, he always remained true to his dictum: “find a need and fill it.” (Throughout, Jenkins and Hines pour out Gaston’s rules for success and homespun wisdom like ketchup on fries.) African-American community needs in Birmingham were certainly many, and few were being filled until Gaston came along. An indefatigable saver of his modest income, he started a small lending practice (charging 25 percent interest), then a funeral-insurance agency. During the Depression he bought script at 50 percent of its face value and started a motel and restaurant, amassing a sizable fortune. Civil-rights activists knew they could turn to Gaston when they needed money or a liaison with the white community. He was more like Booker T. Washington than Martin Luther King, more National Negro Business League than NAACP, but in tumultuous civil-rights-era Birmingham that was enough to get his house firebombed. His descendants’ loving portrait reveals the pivotal, if milder, role black business leaders played in the struggle for racial justice, but familial minutia blurs Gaston rather than adding to his focus.
A bit like an overlong home movie.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45347-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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