by David Goodman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999
The transformation of South Africa from apartheid to democracy traced sometimes prosaically, sometimes astutely through the lives of eight representative South Africans. Goodman, an activist and journalist whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and Christian Science Monitor, et al., knows South Africa well, from extensive reportorial stints, but the whiff of the slightly uncomprehending outsider still wafts through this book. He witnesses a great deal but doesn—t always completely understand, blinkered by his own cultural constructions and prejudices. Yet it is precisely this baggage that sometimes allows him the kind of unflinching honesty many native South Africans would never dare. He sees all too clearly the failed promises of uhuru (liberation), the promised houses, promised jobs, promised social justice that never quite materializes as the emerging black middle class focuses more on its own material well- being than on general uplift of the poor. In choosing his subjects, Goodman has cleverly tried to pair opposites: an anti-apartheid activist and the security policeman who plotted his assassination; one of the architects of apartheid and his radical grandson; a struggling black activist maid and a successful black woman entrepreneur; a white and a black farmer. When he is actively recounting the lives and struggles of these people, Goodman is superb. His portraits of the policeman, incapacitated by the horrors he has wrought, and the entrepreneur, an “apartheid jujitsu artist,” are first-rate. But he does not trust his characters enough to bring out the larger issues he’s so concerned about. So he takes extended detours into conventional historicizing and tired polemicizing, often reducing these usually fascinating flesh-and-blood people to little more than vague points of reference. (b&w photos, not seen
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-520-21736-5
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
Share your opinion of this book
More by Amy Goodman
BOOK REVIEW
by Amy Goodman with David Goodman & Denis Moynihan
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
18
Our Verdict
GET IT
Google Rating
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2016
New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.