Schneiderhan leaves it to us to continue the journey these two began. His work, like theirs, is inspiring.
Schneiderhan’s (Sociology/Univ. of Toronto) biographical comparison of Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Barack Obama illustrates how little has changed regarding the difficulties of community building.
You wouldn’t think there would be many similarities between a wealthy Illinois woman and a young, mixed-race political activist, but their characters and the paths they followed bind them together. Both had traveled widely and could have enjoyed a comfortable life, but something drove them to the Chicago neighborhoods. Addams was educated only to a point, and she was independently wealthy but knew she had a calling to help the poor. Emulating Toynbee Hall social settlement in London’s East End, she learned the usefulness of living amid the poor and helping them as neighbors. Obama was lucky in securing a place at Hawaii’s most prestigious private school. His excellent education there and at Columbia and Harvard socialized him into the privileged world Addams knew. Both needed that education and socialization to mix with business and the elite to achieve their goals. Schneiderhan is wise to present these biographies back to back rather than point out commonalities one after another. He shows how these two illuminated the American dream even though race and gender loomed large to prevent them. They both saw communities where neighbors helped out in small ways, but neighbors often couldn’t help in securing jobs, education, child care, or a central gathering place. Addams’ Hull House led the way in the settlement movement, which directly addressed the problem. She fought against the stingy relief of charity organizations and helped neighbors help each other. Obama did likewise, convincing his community to speak up for themselves, getting voters registered, and, like Addams, believing in people.
Schneiderhan leaves it to us to continue the journey these two began. His work, like theirs, is inspiring.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8917-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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