A generous biographer, Clinton sometimes accepts too uncritically the many legends that proliferate in the fertile Tubman...
Well-written bio of the former slave who became an engineer on the Underground Railroad, a loyal supporter of John Brown, a Civil War nurse and spy, and a fiery advocate for women’s suffrage.
Less hobbled by academic conventions than Kate Clifford Larson’s recent Bound for the Promised Land (p. 1262), this new account of “the Black Moses” trots along at a brisk pace. Clinton (Civil War Stories, 1998, etc.) begins in 1908, when the elderly Tubman appears at the opening in Auburn, New York, of the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged and Indigent, her last great public endeavor. (She died five years later—the year Rosa Parks was born.) The author then takes us back to the Eastern Shore of antebellum Maryland, where Araminta Ross, as Tubman was then called, was born sometime between 1815 and 1825. Like all biographers of slaves, Clinton could consult only a slim file on her subject’s early years; documentation is particularly scant in Tubman’s case because a courthouse fire in the 1850s destroyed important papers. The author assiduously paints the region’s cultural background and helps us imagine Tubman maturing within it, but is nonetheless forced to make frequent use of phrases like “little is known” and such words as “perhaps.” Clinton persists, giving more or less authentic accounts of Harriet’s childhood, her marriage to John Tubman (who did not flee the South with her), her escape to Canada, her numerous and increasingly dangerous returns to help free relatives and others, her rise to prominence in the Underground Railroad, her service to the Union in the Civil War (it took years to extract a $20 monthly pension from the government for her efforts), her many speaking appearances (she was by all accounts a stunning performer), her struggles to support herself and those who relied on her.
A generous biographer, Clinton sometimes accepts too uncritically the many legends that proliferate in the fertile Tubman soil. Still: a clear, concise portrait of “Moses” in her milieux. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-14492-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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