An intelligent recollection of a life devoted to politics and the public welfare.
In this brief memoir, a man recounts his experiences as a researcher, a member of the British Parliament, and a Jew.
Moonman’s (Learning to Live in the Violent Society, 2005, etc.) father, Borach, was born in 1878 in Berdichev, Russia, a small city not far from Odessa. In response to a lack of opportunity and burgeoning anti-Semitism, he moved to Liverpool, where he started a milk distribution business. The author was Borach’s ninth child after eight girls were born, and was a precocious lover of cinema and football. His family left Liverpool in 1940 to escape the devastating German bombing campaigns, a move that effectively forced Moonman’s father into retirement. When still only 13 years old, the author left school—he needed permission from the local labor exchange because he was so young—to begin work for a local newspaper in Liverpool. He subsequently gained an apprenticeship with a printing firm. Meanwhile, he studied economics at Liverpool College of Commerce—later he became a full-time student at the University of Liverpool—and founded the first Guild of Young Printers, which was sponsored by the Typographical Association. After working at the British Institute of Management, he won a seat in Parliament representing Basildon in Essex. Moonman meticulously remembers his work as an MP—he served more than once—in particular his devotion to public health, the fight against racism, and human rights. He also discusses in vivid detail his visit to Greece to provide humanitarian aid after it was stricken by an earthquake in 1953, and a trip to Namibia at the behest of the International Red Cross to help draft a socio-economic plan for the nation. Moonman writes in clear, if sometimes clunky, prose, and his remembrances of political maneuvering can be needlessly microscopic. But his life is truly memorable, and his interests are as diverse as they are energetically pursued. The most thoughtful discussions are about his experiences as a Jew frequently encountering prejudice, and his philosophical commitments to both Zionism and socialism. For those interested in the inner workings of public service in England, this is an insightful treatment.
An intelligent recollection of a life devoted to politics and the public welfare.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-8504-1
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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