A disturbing, though overwrought, odyssey through same-sex harassment in the workplace, in this case the improbable, dangerous setting of an Alabama railroad yard. Martin was a third-generation railroad man, with 14 years on the job on the Norfolk Southern line, when his position in South Carolina was eliminated and he was offered a promotion and transfer to the high-volume Birmingham yard. Because he thought tradition and the work’s inherent stress had made the railroad an amiable fraternity, he was shocked to find hostility, expressed by three workers in grossly sexual terms. The harassment followed a well-established pattern, both in its escalation and in the futility of Martin’s complaints to supervisors, and when he finally filed a lawsuit, his confidentiality was breached and he ultimately became a pariah at work after the union employed heavy-handed tactics to protest the harassers— termination. Martin’s detailed narrative shows how, despite nightmares and social paranoia ultimately diagnosed as PTSD, he rebuilt his life with the aid of a woman he met and married in Birmingham. When Martin’s case came to trial—at the same time as a more widely reported case stemming from same-sex harassment on an offshore oil rig—he emerged triumphant with a six-figure settlement despite a hostile judge and a phalanx of opposing attorneys whose defense largely consisted of distraction and smear tactics. Martin is an enthusiastic but trying author, resorting frequently to purple similes, repetitive emotional rhetoric, and a general air of strident alarm (e.g., a chapter titled —The Diesel Shop of Horrors—). For all his hand-wringing, however, he offers a telling account of the world of contemporary railroading, evoking both its romance and its potential terrors. Indisputably an important window into a little-discussed social abuse, fed here by gender and class volatility and contemporary blue-collar angst.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-929175-08-6
Page Count: 184
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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