Freedman (History/Stanford), author of a previous book on prison reform, tackles the commanding Miriam Van Waters, an early prison reformer and feminist. Van Waters grew up in Oregon, the eldest child of an open-minded minister and a mother who suffered from nerves. After obtaining her undergraduate and master's degrees in philosophy, Van Waters obtained a Ph.D. in anthropology. Whether it was from some innate sense of duty or from years of caring for her siblings and her mother, Van Waters became an ardent believer that even the most hardened female criminal was salvageable. She returned to the West Coast for a tour of duty in California's juvenile court system, where she obtained the rank of judge and was famous for her tongue-lashings of men who had abandoned pregnant girlfriends. She left in 1932 with her adopted child, Sarah, and made her way to the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, where she would become superintendent. A compelling presence, Van Waters used such basic tools as trust and friendship to effect a change in the prisoners, whom she elected to call ``students.'' This period of Van Waters's work is the most exciting, complete with a political effort to remove her from office on charges that she condoned homosexuality in the prison. However, Freedman avoids a fuller account of Van Waters's prison and focuses instead upon proving, with diary entries and letters, that Van Waters was herself a lesbian. The reformer's letters to Geraldine Thompson, her benefactor and a friend to Eleanor Roosevelt, are frankly obvious, and the legacy of Van Waters's prison reform becomes a bit lost amid long evaluations of this relationship. A fascinating and brilliant woman, whose personality shines through sometimes plodding and digressive prose. (40 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-226-26149-2
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
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