A provocative but occasionally egotistical book.
Attorney Rice revisits her past and the career achievements that made her a top civil-rights litigator.
The daughter of educated and socially ambitious middle-class parents, the author took an early interest in defending the less fortunate. She also understood that her “cocktail lineage” put her in a special and to some degree privileged position with respect to other African-Americans. While many dark-skinned people “threatened white existence,” Rice’s lighter skin allowed her to live a sheltered life in a mostly white world. Determined to make a difference in the world, like her heroine, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Rice attended Harvard University and then NYU law school, where she would learn “the skills needed to bend the powerful.” Her first foray into the legal realm was as a law clerk with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) in New York City, where she worked to exonerate death-row inmates in Georgia. As a full-fledged lawyer at the LDF’s Los Angeles office, she plunged headfirst into L.A.’s gang underworld and became notorious as the gadfly of a brutally corrupt LAPD. Her work on behalf of the poor and dispossessed also led her to champion the building of new schools in an ineffective, overcrowded L.A. public-school system. Parts of the narrative—e.g., her recounting of her bare-knuckled interactions with inner-city gangs and a dysfunctional LAPD—are genuinely compelling. However, the author’s irritating tendency toward self-congratulation detracts from her genuinely inspiring, passionate story.
A provocative but occasionally egotistical book.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7500-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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