An overwrought, highly sentimental account of a worthy community service project.
A white writer who seems to have a wrenching epiphany on every page helps some black residents of east Texas clean up an abandoned, overgrown cemetery.
In The Bond Between Women (1998), Galland circled the globe to meet activists battling child prostitution, illiteracy, pollution and death squads. Here, she hangs around Texas to learn that racism is bad, that we all ought to get along and that Jesus is the way. It’s not a step forward in her work. She begins with a childhood memory of a spooky old house in her grandmother’s Dallas neighborhood, occupied by a weird white woman who once kept her Negro gardener prisoner in the attic. Galland says she learned then that in matters of race “the white narrative dominates and prevails and discredits and trivializes” other stories. Shifting to the east Texas countryside, she launches into the story of how she and some local black women went out to a cemetery named for the Love family (no one seemed to know who currently owned it), saw what a mess it was and decided to do something about it. The author started reading histories of Africa, the slave trade and Texas, doing interviews, conducting research in the county courthouse and historical society, arranging for videography. She attended the local Baptist church and found the congregation’s religious enthusiasm infectious, even revelatory. She helped round up volunteers to attack the wilderness reclaiming the cemetery. Throughout, Galland assumes readers know nothing about American racial history: She summarizes key moments in the civil-rights movement and tells us that during the Middle Passage “life in the ship’s hold was pure hell.” Though she says it’s dehumanizing to refer to people in slavery as “slaves,” her subtitle does just that. When she has a falling out with one of the black women working on the project, her self-flagellation and White Guilt reach epic proportions.
An overwrought, highly sentimental account of a worthy community service project.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-077931-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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