A provocative, welcome contribution to ethnic studies and the literature of civil rights.
Illuminating investigation of the historical binaries of race in America.
Before American independence, writes freelance journalist Brook, places such as Charleston and New Orleans turned on the assumption that “in the New World there was precious little racial purity” and that naturally and inevitably, people who came from far-flung ethnic groups would meet and intermingle. After independence, however, that changed: The official appointed to govern New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase, for instance, quietly instituted procedures to limit the rights of supposedly nonwhite citizens even if, as a later activist who pressed for the rights of all citizens no matter what their ethnic composition noted, “if you were not informed you would be sure to pick out the white for colored & the colored for white.” Free, mixed-race communities in those cosmopolitan cities had long flourished, even if they were anomalous elsewhere. It outraged nativists, notes the author, that immigrants from Europe who arrived in the 19th century treated everyone they encountered as equals. Yet this equality was fleeting. South Carolina Reconstruction-era congressman Joseph Hayne Rainey observed in a speech before the House that in Charleston he could enjoy public amenities while in Washington, he was denied “the same benefits that are accorded to our white colleagues on this floor.” Things would only get worse for Rainey and others now classified as black in the postwar binary of race through the mechanism of Jim Crow laws throughout the country. The very idea of “black” and “white,” Brook ably demonstrates, is the product of segregation: “It is only because mixed-race activists failed, despite their valiant efforts, to stop a regime of race-based rights that contemporary Americans view society through the racial blinders that we do.” In his fluent narrative, the author shows how much we have lost by denying the reality that "we are mestizos, Creoles, misfits all.”
A provocative, welcome contribution to ethnic studies and the literature of civil rights.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-24744-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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