An important document of the struggles (and triumphs) faced by African-American journalists from the 1960s until today.
Affecting memoir by an African-American journalism pioneer focused on racial and gender equality.
Retired Washington Post reporter and columnist Gilliam (Paul Robeson: All American, 1976) looks back on her distinguished career, during which she helped spur diversity in the media, beginning in an era when such change seemed nearly impossible. “I saw myself,” she writes, “as one of the new-style, aggressive black Americans moving up in Washington and elsewhere [and] I immediately faced prejudice outside and inside the tension-filled newsroom.” Gilliam (b. 1936) was the first black woman journalist hired at the Post, and though some colleagues reached out, the author amply shows the surreal, hurtful quality of social segregation in the early 1960s. Before that, she experienced Jim Crow during a childhood in Memphis and Louisville; her father’s occupation as a pastor showed her both poverty and an aspiration for knowledge and success. In the book’s most powerful section, Gilliam narrates her experiences covering infamous civil rights flashpoints, including recollections of white supremacist mob violence: “As a Southerner, I knew Mississippi was a land of black death, but I went anyway.” After a hiatus, during which she raised children with the artist Sam Gilliam, she received an offer from Ben Bradlee to come back to the Post, which was then being questioned for its lack of diversity. “As a black person,” she writes, “I had been fighting racial discrimination in the media for more than a decade.” Gilliam remained at the Post until 2013 and then immersed herself in efforts to bring young people of color into the media. The author writes with an acute sense of the historical significance of her career and the changes she witnessed, and she forcefully demonstrates the continuing crisis regarding people of color in mainstream journalism. Only occasionally does the narrative become repetitive or tiresome, but on the whole, the pages turn easily.
An important document of the struggles (and triumphs) faced by African-American journalists from the 1960s until today.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5460-8344-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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