The most telling line of this well-crafted and timely story comes from Lewis as well: “They were friends, and didn’t even...
Dual biography of two of the most ardent, inspiring, and complex champions of American civil rights.
The lives of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were destined to be forever coupled, not least because of their complicated relationships with Bobby’s brother, John F. Kennedy. Here, longtime Vanity Fair journalist Margolick (Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, 2013, etc.) brings the same insight and cleareyed analysis that he has brought to his storied biographies and racially potent historical analyses. Although the lives of both men have been covered in detail, Margolick does a fine job of not only portraying crucial events—with the help of new interviews and newly unsealed histories and documents—but also plowing through the misty romanticism that still surrounds these men. “It’s instructive sometimes to study the pre-hagiographic histories of saints,” he writes. Here, Kennedy struggles to uncloak his reputation for being “ruthless” even as he has to shoulder the emotional burden of his brother’s assassination. King, meanwhile, “grew more famous, ambitious, revered and inspiring, loathed and threatening, angry, bitter, radical, desperate.” They lived their lives wary of each other, shadowboxing in the public arena, as illustrated by the dramatic historical photographs that punctuate the book. But via Margolick’s account, we learn these men had far more in common than even they thought, including struggles with depression that stand in stark contrast to the optimism they inspired in a nation. While there’s a fatalism that hangs over their arcs, it’s inspiring to see that both men were propelled, even to the end, by the causes of racial equality and social justice. “When these two young men were murdered, something died in all of us,” said civil rights icon John Lewis. “We were robbed of part of our future.”
The most telling line of this well-crafted and timely story comes from Lewis as well: “They were friends, and didn’t even know that they were friends.”Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948122-26-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
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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