A worthwhile Civil War biography cogently presented and ready for the big screen.
An audacious paragon of the Civil War, now largely forgotten, is brought back to life, and his rags-to-riches adventure is certainly worth the revisit.
In the cotton-rich cradle of the Confederacy, not far from Charleston, South Carolina, Robert Smalls (1839-1915) was born a slave. Once an illiterate house servant in the Beaufort home of his owner, the affable Smalls quickly became a hero in the North and an enemy in the South. It all started when the clever Smalls conceived of and executed a plan to release himself, his family, and several others from bondage and, in the doing, render a service to the Union. It was a dramatic, even cinematic, scheme. Smalls was a proficient steersman, hired out to work aboard the Planter, a Confederate steamer, in Charleston’s harbor. One day in May 1862, with his black crew and frightened passengers aboard, he commandeered the ship and navigated it out to the Union blockade of Charleston. In the dim light, disguised with the boat captain’s distinctive headgear, Smalls sailed the Planter past Southern fortifications port and starboard. It was an impressive feat. Reliable, congenial, and whip-smart, he became the toast of the North. He assumed the captaincy of the Planter, lectured in Northern cities, met President Abraham Lincoln, and assisted freed slaves (who were, to keep them free, considered “contraband”). Smalls also learned to read and write, became a man of means, and bought and occupied the Beaufort home of his former master. He even became a member of Congress. This is unquestionably a remarkable story, and journalist Lineberry (The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of American Nurses and Medics Behind Nazi Lines, 2013, etc.) ably tells it as a microcosm of the war. It’s a tale of politics and battles told with clarity, and the matter-of-fact discussions of people owning other people remains as jarring as it should.
A worthwhile Civil War biography cogently presented and ready for the big screen.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10186-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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