An absorbing, fresh perspective on black history.
How racial challenges shaped the life of an influential African American.
Redcaps—porters and luggage handlers—at New York’s Grand Central Terminal started in 1895 and by 1905 were entirely staffed by African American men. The job, writes Washington (Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem, 2002) in a thoroughly researched and illuminating biography, was “a rare and propitious employment option in an era of rigid racial barriers.” Foremost among the redcaps was James H. Williams (1878-1948), who, from 1909 to 1948, served as “a general factotum” whose duties involved “hiring, training, assigning, and supervising some five hundred men.” Known as “the Chief,” he became an influential figure in New York’s African American community, famous “for rallying his Red Cap porters to support ‘racial uplift’ causes.” Those causes included supporting the NAACP; organizing mutual aid societies to alleviate financial troubles and bolster business ventures; mounting a fundraising campaign for a Colored YMCA and YMHA in Harlem; buying war bonds at the outbreak of World War I; and participating in the Grand Central Red Cap Orchestra, band, and chorus. The Red Cap Quartet performed regularly on national radio; the orchestra played at the 15th reunion of the Princeton University class of 1917. Besides promoting civic and cultural projects, Williams organized both a baseball and a basketball team, making sure that their games received positive media attention. Washington gives a palpable sense of the myriad obstacles blacks faced: Many redcaps, for example, had college training but saw “that a diploma did not ensure the ability to break through certain prevailing Jim Crow barriers.” Williams’ eldest son transcended the color line to become the first black fireman in Manhattan, inciting every fireman in the company to request a transfer (requests that were denied); a few years later, he was the first black fireman promoted to the rank of officer. As one former redcap wrote on the eve of World War II, as “a soldier fighting for those things that are constantly being reiterated as the American way,” he protested that black workers were “tyrannized, intimated, and plagued.”
An absorbing, fresh perspective on black history.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-322-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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