A well-researched, highly readable treatment of an important era in racial relations, encapsulated in the meeting of two of...
On Oct. 16, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited a black man, Booker T. Washington, to dinner—and set off a scandal.
It was a typical gesture for the impulsive Roosevelt, who had been made vice president in hopes that his progressive ideals would wither in the largely impotent position. But the assassination of William McKinley made Roosevelt president, and the Republican establishment’s nightmares began. Washington was the embodiment of the rags-to-riches American dream, an ex-slave risen to become the head of the Tuskegee Institute. Davis (Gilded: How Newport Became America's Richest Resort, 2009, etc.) weaves together the two men’s biographies with a portrait of their era—simultaneously a time of immense progress and widespread bigotry. Roosevelt was convinced that the nation’s growth required African-Americans to take a fuller role in national affairs; he also saw the black vote in the South as a key ingredient of Republican power. Shortly after assuming the presidency, he began quietly to consult Washington on political appointments in the South. The dinner seemed a natural outgrowth of that relationship, and it went smoothly enough. However, after an Atlanta reporter wrote about it, the South erupted in fury; a line had been crossed. The dinner became an excuse for lynchings and other racial persecutions and led to a cooling of what had been an important working relationship. Some progressive blacks, including W.E.B. Du Bois, criticized the dinner as setting back racial relations. On the other hand, Scott Joplin used it as the theme of an opera, A Guest of Honor. Davis gives a clear overview of race relations in the closing decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, with plenty of additional detail on the times.
A well-researched, highly readable treatment of an important era in racial relations, encapsulated in the meeting of two of the era’s most significant men.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6981-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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