Amid the current concerns over global labor exploitation, this is a timely, unromanticized reminder that human suffering has...
A stimulating biography of the pugnacious labor organizer that sheds light on radical movements while questioning the myth-making machine that surrounds great figures.
Gorn (The Manly Art, not reviewed) tells the story of two women: Mary Harris Jones and her nom de guerre, Mother Jones. Digging deep into news archives, journals, census files, and other sources, he finds truths about the life of the former that have been obscured by the self-created myth of the latter. Mary Harris was born in Ireland during the summer of 1837; Mother Jones claimed May Day, 1830, as her natal date. After emigrating to America, Mary Harris Jones lost her four children (and her husband) to yellow fever in 1867; Mother Jones proclaimed herself a mother to all workers. Through this juxtaposition, the reader sees what is, despite some unfulfilled promise and a fair share of lost battles, an American success story. An immigrant, a woman, an elderly widow, and a worker, she made her voice heard throughout her adopted land by dint of “nothing but courage, compassion and commitment,” Gorn writes. Yet her legacy has been “blunted,” he asserts, along with “memories of America’s radical tradition.” Once an “apostle of working-class militance,” since her death in 1930 Mother Jones has been sanitized into a benevolent matriarch. Gorn never offers an entirely satisfactory answer to the question of how and why a middle-aged, widowed seamstress made her way onto labor’s center stage at the end of the 19th century. He settles on cumulative experience as the key, arguing that personal tragedy and early exposure to radical thinking, combined with nearly half a century of witnessing poor people’s struggles, “energized the life of Mother Jones.”
Amid the current concerns over global labor exploitation, this is a timely, unromanticized reminder that human suffering has accompanied industrial change in the past, and that people fought to ameliorate it.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8090-7093-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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