A noble personification of the civil rights movement and an inspirational manual on instilling empowerment and possibility...
A potent hybrid of prideful memoir and galvanizing guidebook derived from lectures on race and education.
Esteemed youth leader and president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Hrabowski (Overcoming the Odds: Raising Academically Successful African American Young Women, 2002, etc.) was barely a teenager when he was arrested for participation in the anti-discrimination Children’s Crusade march in central Alabama in 1963. His highly personal account retraces this event and its impact on his life and livelihood, which began in oppressive Birmingham, where he was raised by hardworking teacher parents who fostered his early affinity for mathematics. With his parents’ ambivalent blessings, Hrabowski, just 12, joined the historic civil rights march against antagonistic segregation and was swiftly corralled in a mass arrest and jailed with hardened criminals for five days. The words of Martin Luther King Jr. would soon motivate him into forging a career in education, the promotion of critical thinking curriculums such as goal-based academic disciplines, and youth advocacy. In other sections of the book, the author praises the evolution of his university’s innovative culture and the impressive role it has played in promoting undergraduate education and research work amid an all-inclusive, unsegregated atmosphere conducive to learning. His discussion dovetails nicely with the book’s concluding chapters, which address the historical advancement of American educational and economic opportunities, particularly for African-Americans. Spawned from the speeches Hrabowski delivered during the Simmons College-Beacon Press Race, Education, and Democracy Lecture series in 2013, the book’s strength derives from the advancements achieved by African-American students, in which the author has played a significant role. Still, he acknowledges that there is much more work to be done with regard to overall unemployment rates, income levels, and civic equality.
A noble personification of the civil rights movement and an inspirational manual on instilling empowerment and possibility in today’s youth.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0344-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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