A moving reminder of the power of the human will.
A touching first-person account of a doughty political activist who walked from California to Washington, D.C., to promote campaign-finance reform.
Haddock (or “Granny D,” as she came to be known) is a tough old Yankee who seems to have stepped straight out of a Reader’s Digest “Most Unforgettable Character” article. She was just a few days shy of her 89th birthday when she began her cross-country hike on January 2, 1999. With help from Common Cause (coauthor Burke is director of Arizona Common Cause), relatives, friends, and a growing number of supporters, she trekked across the western deserts, the plains of Texas, the hills of Arkansas and West Virginia, and eventually through the streets of the nation’s capital to call attention to the issue. Except for 100 miles along the C&O Canal towpath (which she covered on cross-country skis), Haddock walked the entire way. At the rate of ten miles a day (with frequent stops to meet people, make speeches, and give interviews), her journey lasted 14 months. Much of this narrative is taken from her journal, to which she devoted two hours every evening, and most of it deals with events of the walk itself. The self-portrait that emerges makes clear that the author’s late-in-life public venture was not some sudden whim but an act grounded in a lifetime of intelligent concern, forthrightness, and involvement. Haddock includes excerpts from encouraging letters and e-mail messages she received from people following her progress, as well as highlights from some of her speeches (longer excerpts are in an appendix). Whether her efforts succeed in bringing about campaign finance reform remains to be seen, but politicians should be put on notice: this media-savvy old lady is now back in Dublin, New Hampshire, getting in shape for more walks.
A moving reminder of the power of the human will.Pub Date: April 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50539-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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