As one of the few women to hold a leadership position in the civil rights movement, Powers has a compelling story, but it is far overshadowed by her kiss-and-tell tales about her affair with Martin Luther King Jr. Powers makes a real effort here to narrate her evolution from small-town girl to the first black—and first woman—to be elected to the Kentucky state senate (in 1967). After two unfulfilling marriages and some equally unfulfilling jobs, she volunteered for a local campaign. She then advanced to become a member of the Executive Committee of the Jefferson County Democratic Party before running for office. Having only completed community college, Powers had to learn on the fly, and it's inspiring to read how she schooled herself in the arts of politics and government and sponsored several influential bills. As a political pioneer who served 21 years in the Kentucky Senate, Powers is a ripe prospect for a straight political memoir. But what she's really selling here is details of her affair with King. It's no secret that King had extramarital affairs, which were documented by the FBI. But never before has one of his lovers stepped forward to share the pillow talk. Powers tells how she was first approached by King, and she goes into specifics about how rendezvous were arranged. She writes that she saw him as a man, not a god, and how their friendship blossomed into romance. She doesn't mention King's wife or family until after she tells of the assassination, when she goes to the house to offer her condolences. The scene is straight soap opera- -the innocent wife and the repentant mistress meet at last. One can't help but wish that Powers had decided what book she really wanted to write—her political autobiography or her schoolgirlish romantic diary. (photos, not seen) (First printing of 30,000; author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88282-127-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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