The facts might fill a scholarly article, the story could form a film or novel, the scholarship would make a compelling...
Two independent scholars attempt with only moderate success to flesh out the skeletal story of an 1841 mutiny by slaves aboard a ship headed from Richmond to New Orleans.
The authors set themselves a daunting task: to reconstruct from minimal documentary evidence both the life of Madison Washington, leader of the revolt, and the mutiny itself. But at nearly every crucial moment they are forced to acknowledge that little or nothing is known, or to ask questions that simply make the same point. “Did Madison Washington arrive in Richmond in a coffle?” they ask. “How did the slaves happen to have a gun?” they wonder. With so little supporting material, they decided to tell similar stories about which more is known and imply that the cases of Madison Washington and the Creole must have been similar. The result is a collection of excerpts from slave narratives, histories of the period, and accounts of other slave revolts. (Melville’s “Benito Cereno” earns some space here.) Even the illustrations are sometimes a stretch: one shows another slave ship, while the caption indicates that the Creole resembled it neither in size nor rigging. Washington’s story is an engaging one nonetheless. He initially escaped into Canada, then took the Underground Railroad in reverse in a failed attempt to rescue his wife. He was recaptured and put aboard the Creole; he and 18 others took over the vessel, killed one officer, and sailed to Nassau in the Bahamas. British authorities there eventually freed them all, and Washington vanished from history. So the volume must suffice as a set of suppositions accompanied by a primer about the slave trade and the unspeakable conditions endured by its victims.
The facts might fill a scholarly article, the story could form a film or novel, the scholarship would make a compelling memoir. But there isn’t enough detail for the conventional history essayed here. (24 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: April 11, 2003
ISBN: 1-56663-493-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
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