Personal and interesting, though the hesitancy and complacency of Reverend Marsh and the good citizens of Laurel are less...
Reminiscences of growing up white and middle-class in the Deep South during the late 1960s.
Marsh (Religion/Univ. of Virginia; God’s Long Summer, not reviewed) details his experiences as an adolescent with disarming candor and wit. In 1967, his father, the Reverend Bob Marsh, accepted a post at the First Baptist Church of Laurel, Mississippi, unaware that he was sailing into a maelstrom. The Marsh family arrived in a community deeply divided along racial lines. However, in an effort to avoid antagonizing his congregation, Reverend Marsh initially chose to avoid speaking out on the issue, rationalizing his decision with the claim that segregation was a matter of “politics,” and not an appropriate topic for the pulpit. Living and working in one of the most prominent FBI-KKK battlegrounds of the late 1960s made this stance increasingly uncomfortable for the pious minister, and his internal conflict began to spill over both at home and in church. He briefly considered leaving the pulpit to teach, until a series of events combined to encourage the reverend to change his tune. The remainder of the text details the town’s efforts to comply with the federally mandated desegregation of its public schools; the author offers humorous, touching anecdotes describing his own experiences and interactions with his new classmates. While anticlimactic, the ending is realistic and evokes considerable sympathy for the difficulties white Mississippians had to face when their long-held perceptions of reality were overruled by national popular opinion.
Personal and interesting, though the hesitancy and complacency of Reverend Marsh and the good citizens of Laurel are less than inspiring.Pub Date: March 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-04418-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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