A close look at a 19th-century author and abolitionist that integrates her personal life, her work, and the eventful period in US history during which she lived. Karcher (English, American Studies, Women's Studies/Temple Univ.; Shadow Over the Promised Land, not reviewed) is a staunch advocate of her subject, tracing the ``trajectory'' of Child's life from her earliest fiction through her anti-slavery work and later advocacy of women's and Indian's rights. Child (180280), who entered the literary limelight with Hobomok, a novel sympathetic to Indians and hostile to patriarchy, compounded her success by founding Juvenile Miscellany, a hugely popular children's magazine. But love came to Child at a high price: Her husband, newspaper editor David Lee Child, was a terrible businessman who accumulated debts faster than she could cover them. Karcher, clearly appalled by a woman ``abasing herself to the husband responsible for sabotaging her career,'' indicates that Child's early opposition to gender equality could have been rooted in devotion to her marriage. Need for cash drove her to write on domestic economy, but after an 1830 meeting with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, her life and writings acquired a greater goal. With the publication of her first major work on slavery, Child's formerly adoring public became incensed, the Juvenile Miscellany folded, and her activities as an anti- slavery activist put her in danger (as Karcher's comments on mob violence effectively indicate). Karcher is at her best when Child herself is a lion; less impressive are the occasional psychological speculations (e.g., on the possible connection in Child's mind between abolitionist John Brown and her parents) and excuses for Child not meeting late-20th-century standards for political correctness (e.g., depression and housework kept her from fighting the Fugitive Slave Law). This valuable portrait of a complex and talented woman may be most notable for indicating the extent to which she was of- -rather than ahead of—her time. (10 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8223-1485-1
Page Count: 785
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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