An illuminating view of an era whose reform spirit would live on in the 1960s civil rights movement.
A richly detailed history of former slaves’ rising to political involvement in the American South after the Civil War.
Egerton (History/Le Moyne Coll.; Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election that Brought on the Civil War, 2010, etc.) recalls Reconstruction at the state and local levels, where thousands of black veterans, activists, ministers, assemblymen and others, with help from white allies, integrated streetcars and schools and ran for office in this “first progressive era in the nation’s history.” It was a remarkable time: Black voting and education surged across the South, and African-Americans held three of four congressional seats in South Carolina—the state most identified with slavery and secession. Many forces were at work: More than 175,000 African-Americans had served in the Union Army, and many became voters, activists, and eventually, state and federal officeholders. The federal Freedmen’s Bureau sponsored hundreds of schools for freed children, and black churches became increasingly significant. For all that, the “window of enormous opportunity” for reform was lost, mainly due to inaction by Andrew Johnson, “a racist, accidental president,” and whites’ guerrilla war against black Republicans. As states passed black codes to stymie gains, whites torched interracial schools and churches, blaming Northern agitators for filling freedmen’s heads with visions of equality. Egerton offers sharp sketches of freedmen, including Tunis Campbell, a black activist who supervised resettlement in Georgia; Oberlin-educated Blanche Kelso Bruce, who served as a U.S. senator from Mississippi; and war hero Robert Smalls, whose mistreatment on a Charleston streetcar prompted threats of a boycott of public transportation. He suggests that popular culture (Gone with the Wind, etc.) has sentimentalized the Old South and inaccurately portrayed Reconstruction as a vindictive, undemocratic period.
An illuminating view of an era whose reform spirit would live on in the 1960s civil rights movement.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-566-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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