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
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
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