A powerful mix of opinion, reporting and poignant recollection.
Newsweek columnist and McLaughlin Group pundit Clift combines a journalist’s account of the political circus surrounding Terri Schiavo’s death with the personal story of the death of her husband, Tom Brazaitis.
During the last two weeks of March 2005, both lay dying, the cancer-ridden Brazaitis quietly at home, the brain-damaged Schiavo in a Florida hospice center surrounded by fervid demonstrators and swarming media. Clift organizes their stories in the form of a diary, but each day’s entry is not limited to the events of that day. She provides ample background to the Schiavo case, giving a capsule history of the right to refuse medical treatment. She presents forthright portraits of Schiavo’s family members—her parents, who wanted her kept alive, and her husband, who wanted her to be allowed to die—who had been fighting for years over who should decide her fate. The author gives even more attention to the politicians and the pro-life and disability-rights figures who insisted that she be kept alive, and the judge who ruled repeatedly on her right to die. The Schiavo case, writes Clift, was the center of an “extraordinary clash…between the religious right aided and abetted by the full force of the federal government and the U.S. judiciary in the person of Judge Greer.” Drawing on transcripts from the McLaughlin Group, the author offers her own opinions on the politics of the situation, taking to task President George Bush, Governor Jab Bush and the Republicans in Congress. Meanwhile, her beloved husband was dying at home, his brain and bones invaded by cancer that had spread from his kidney, his care shared by Clift and hospice workers. Some readers may be offended by what could be viewed as an invasion of his privacy as the author includes unpleasant details of the physical and mental deterioration of a dying man. An epilogue contains roughly a dozen of Brazaitis’s graceful, rueful columns for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about his struggle with cancer from July 1999 to January 2004.
A powerful mix of opinion, reporting and poignant recollection.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00251-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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