In an intimate glimpse, Coretta steps out from her husband’s shadow.
A glowing portrait of Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow by her sister.
The daughters of a lumber hauler in Alabama’s Black Belt region who was constantly harassed by white employers for his enterprising ways, Coretta and Edythe Scott were both educated at the Lincoln School, a white-run missionary boarding school, and later Antioch College, in Ohio. Embracing the tradition of Christian service instilled by those establishments, Coretta attempted to student teach in the Yellow Springs, Ohio, public-school system in 1950, despite protests by white parents. However, Antioch did not support her, delivering a bitter lesson in the deeply entrenched discrimination that pervaded even the North. A gifted soprano, she attended New England Conservatory in Boston on scholarship, where she met the Georgia-born King, then was a doctoral divinity student at Boston University. Impressed by her long, straight hair and evident intelligence, King sensed she would make the perfect wife. At the time, Coretta began her career as a successful singer, and from King’s first pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, to his last at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Coretta performed intermittently on stage. In 1965, she used a Freedom Concert tour to spread the message for civil-rights change. She was also committed to the antiwar group Women Strike for Peace, which attracted surveillance by the FBI. The author speculates about Coretta’s influence on King’s ultimate resistance to the Vietnam War, writing that the couple “shared vigorous and robust conversation about the issues they faced.” Steely, cerebral and unemotional, Bagley’s portrait reveals a remarkable character forged by harsh reality and unimaginable trial.
In an intimate glimpse, Coretta steps out from her husband’s shadow.Pub Date: April 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1765-2
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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