Compelling aspects of memoir and cultural history mixed with laments and self-defense.
The founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute (Stanford Univ.) reviews his own life, tells how he became involved with the publication of King’s papers and charts the complicated choreography of his relationship with the King family.
Carson, who has edited numerous titles related to King and 1960s civil unrest (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1998, etc.), begins at the 1963 March on Washington when he witnessed King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The author ends with the 2011 opening of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, a project in which he was initially involved. In between these memorial moments are the stories of his own life—growing up in Los Alamos, moving to California, getting involved with student protests, meeting the woman he would marry, rising in academe—and of the day in 1985 when he received a call from Coretta Scott King asking if he would edit her late husband’s papers. Some complicated negotiations ensued and essentially never stopped. His relationship with King’s widow was complex, but with the son Dexter (and his siblings), it resembled something out of a very long Victorian novel. The relationships among the Kings were tricky, too—internecine even—and Carson treads softly on toes, even sort of siding with Dexter’s contention that James Earl Ray was innocent. Carson proceeded to begin publishing King’s papers and to get into print all sorts of other King-related collections. The author sometimes reveals a thin skin and cavils about his hurt feelings concerning things said or not said. A chapter about a Palestinian production of his play Passages of Martin Luther King features backstage spats and wounded egos.
Compelling aspects of memoir and cultural history mixed with laments and self-defense.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-230-62169-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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