A first authoritative biography of Florence Nightingale which is based on a tremendous amount of new material (from family papers to her own exhaustive "private notes") and which creates a powerful, impassioned portrait. For here is no gentle lady of the lamp, but a woman who disregarded her beauty and her wellborn background, who had an amazing aptitude for organization, who avoided all public recognition, whose courage was equalled by a harsh impatience and whose mystic sense of mission was countered by an exaggerated despair. Here, from the time when she was seventeen and she first knew that she was to give her life to the service of others (for her, as well as Joan of Arc, there were the "voices"), there followed a "secret life of agony and aspiration" until she reached the certainty that she was to nurse the sick, and only sixteen years later achieved that end after a bitter break with her family. The apprenticeship which began in the wretchedly squalid hospitals of these times found its apotheosis in the Crimea where she met not only the resentment of the officers and the open freeze of the doctors, but faced the filth of fever ridden barrack hospitals, sickness and starvation, and the overloading of injured men in a calamitous campaign. Broken in health, and in spirit, she returned to England, haunted by the facts of preventable disease, determined to reform health standards. And the last decades represent a lifetime of long and often losing battles among official, political circles, solitude and invalidism, embattled crusade which was not without its cruelty, until the last years brought with them a softening serenity... An impressive, absorbing biography heralded as brilliant by the British press, which will receive strong support here.
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1951
ISBN: 0094758107
Page Count: 615
Publisher: Whittlesey
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1951
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
