by Gary M. Pomerantz ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1996
Just in time for the summer Olympics—a finely drawn, epic history of Atlanta and of two families, one white, one black, who helped shape its development. Pomerantz, a journalist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has done a remarkable job of recounting both public and private events, lucidly showing how the two connect and diverge across the span of decades. Atlanta's beginnings were humble—a railroad junction with the unpromising name of Terminus—but it quickly grew into the largest city in the South. Even its near complete destruction during the Civil War did little to set it back. Adopting the phoenix as its symbol, the city underwent a phenomenal and frenetic reconstruction as thousands of families migrated from the countryside to the ``Big Hustle.'' Among these rural immigrants were the Dobbs, sharecroppers and former slaves, and the Allens, gentlemen farmers. Members of both families quickly rose to join the elites of their respective communities, and their prestige, power, and wealth increased with each generation. While the book's title refers to two Atlanta streets where wealthy whites and blacks made their respective homes, there were few meaningful intersections of their lives until the 1950s and the beginnings of the civil rights movement. During those turbulent years, as segregation slowly came to an end, both families played key, honorable roles, culminating in the election of Ivan Allen Jr. as mayor, followed a few years later by the election of Maynard Jackson, a descendant of the Dobbs family and Atlanta's first black mayor. Pomerantz has accumulated a formidable amount of research and deploys it expertly, ra rarely losing sight of his characters as they play out their unique destinies against the backdrop of history. An engrossing genealogical window on a remarkable city. (Author tour; national radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80717-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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