otherwise immensely interesting human being.
A readable, informative, succinct, respectful, but nonreverential biography of Bill Wilson (1895–1971), the guiding spirit
and organizer of Alcoholics Anonymous, the hugely successful (millions of members in 140 countries) "mother" of all self-help movements. Formerly both a director of the AA-related Stepping Stone Foundation and the longtime secretary and confidant to Bill Wilson's wife, Lois, Hartigan is very much an AA insider. Yet he clearly has done a great deal of research, and is usually able to write with a certain critical distance. Thus, he captures vividly the near-mystical November 1934 experience that impelled the ruinously alcoholic Wilson—at the time, he "lived to drink," had lost countless jobs, and was more than $500,000 (in today's dollars) in debt—to go cold turkey and remain sober the rest of his life. Hartigan also captures Wilson's psychological weaknesses, including his depression (sometimes, as during the long period 1944–53, cripplingly severe), his womanizing, and his smoking, which ultimately killed him. These addictions are far outweighed, however, by Wilson’s range of strengths, including boundless commitment toward the movement he cofounded with Dr. Bob Smith of Akron, Ohio; great personal charm; tremendous organizational entrepreneurship; excellent media relations; and openness toward divergent viewpoints. Wilson made AA into a progressive organization by successfully pushing to allow African-Americans, gays, and lesbians to participate as early as the 1930s and '40s, when such a stance was unpopular, even shocking, to many members. As he demonstrated in experimenting in the late 1950s with LSD, which he hoped would help cure alcoholics, he never outgrew his penchant for risk taking. The author absorbingly presents his hero warts and all, though often assuming readers have too great a familiarity with AA (for example, he frequently alludes to, yet never enumerates, its famous Twelve Steps). Hartigan depicts Wilson as not only an organizational genius, but also as an amazingly resilient, largely appealing, and
otherwise immensely interesting human being.Pub Date: March 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20056-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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