A respectful, if exhausting, portrait of an influential but marginal proponent of racial rage and third-world nationalism...
A biography of the Caribbean-born French psychiatrist-turned-revolutionary whose angry books (Black Skin White Mask, The Wretched of the Earth) and inflammatory speeches furthered the cause of Algerian independence and African nationalism in the 1950s.
What’s more important, the historical facts of a life or the anything-goes deconstructions of surviving texts? Just the facts, says Macey (The Lives of Michel Foucault, 1994, etc.). In his detailed study of this largely-forgotten figure from the war for Algerian independence (Fanon’s books were posthumous bestsellers only in America, and they became somewhat notorious during the American civil rights movement), Macey shows that Fanon’s shrill exultation of violence as a kind of social diuretic, as well as his explosive, frequently incoherent fulminations over racial bigotry, must be understood in terms of his origins. Born in 1925 into a prosperous middle-class family on Martinique that descended from freed slaves, Fanon aspired to what he thought were the civilized refinements of the white minority until he found this minority supporting the bigoted Vichy regime during WWII. But the Left was just as bad: Fanon spent part of the war at a Moroccan training camp for the Resistance, whose French leaders patronized, cheated, and actively despised black Martinicians and African Muslims. Later, as a psychiatrist practicing in a French Algerian mental hospital, Fanon saw African patients consistently misdiagnosed by doctors who refused to understand their culture, leading him to believe that their insanity was a reaction to French fear and loathing. His sympathies for African nationalists led to his banishment from French Algeria. He then became a tireless spokesman, pamphleteer, and rabble-rouser for Algerian independence and African nationalism until he died from cancer in an American hospital.
A respectful, if exhausting, portrait of an influential but marginal proponent of racial rage and third-world nationalism who did not live long enough to see his principles perverted by current regimes. (8 b&w maps)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27550-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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