A complex, entertaining story of intrigue and sangfroid involving a beloved, courageous hero.
A breathless, sympathetic chronicle of the wartime exploits of Josephine Baker (1906-1975).
Rather than crafting a conventional biography, Lewis concentrates on the wartime years, creating a heroic portrait of the selfless, brave, somewhat reckless, pioneering, unswervingly patriotic spy for the Allies who was active even before the Nazi occupation of Paris, where she lived and worked. In a suspenseful, serpentine narrative, the author piles on the detail about Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in France, an agency that worked closely with the Deuxième Bureau, France’s counterespionage service. All were locked in an intelligence battle with the Abwehr, “Nazi Germany’s much expanded intelligence service,” which “sought to overwhelm and subvert her enemies.” Baker, who had been performing in Paris since the early 1920s—after fleeing her impoverished Jim Crow youth in St. Louis and experiencing further hardship in New York City—was running her own club, Chez Josephine, and hobnobbing with admirers of all nationalities. Due to her line of work, she was effective in feeling out the allegiances of significant figures from Italy, Japan, and Spain without raising suspicion. Baker’s Deuxième Bureau supervisor, Capt. Jacques Abtey, also became her lover. “Theirs would prove an intense and tumultuous affair,” writes Lewis, “but one with a special magic all of its own.” After being forced to retreat during the occupation, they worked in various remote locales and slipped effortlessly across national borders. Lewis shows readers how Baker’s difficult life experiences served her well as an agent. “Josephine had never once had it easy,” he writes. “At every stage she had had to fight, to graft and to work unbelievably hard to get ahead. Josephine was blessed with a core of steely fortitude—an unbreakable spirit that was hard wired into her soul.” The author also explores how her wartime work profoundly affected the rest of her life, imperiling her health but also setting her on the postwar course of civil rights activism.
A complex, entertaining story of intrigue and sangfroid involving a beloved, courageous hero.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-0066-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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