Any woman who divorces her first husband simply by declaring him dead is at the very least intriguing: Horne takes on a...
The journey of an itinerant activist, narrated by historian Horne (Fire This Time, not reviewed).
Shirley Graham Du Bois had a life in the arts and something of a political reputation before she married W.E.B. Du Bois, the noted scholar and civil rights leader, in his autumnal years. Horne would have us believe that she didn’t simply marry him as a matter of convenience (he was 81 and she was 55 at the time), but he acknowledges that Shirley’s marriage to Du Bois gave her life a stability and grounding that she never really had before. Extremely fair-skinned, Shirley (born in Indianapolis to Native Americans who claimed French, Scots, Irish, and English blood) always insisted that she was Negro. Her father was a much-traveled African Methodist Episcopal minister who took care to develop his daughter’s interest in music and writing. Shirley’s early years were a dilettante’s muddle of assorted colleges attended, countries visited, and opportunities missed. In the middle of the Depression she staged an opera (Tom Tom) with a cast of 500. No one came. She seemed to have a far greater talent for latching on to people of influence—from NAACP founder Mary White Ovington to Mao Tse Tung—and moving on in her opportunistic way. Slowly, she drifted into political involvement and married Du Bois during the heart of the “Red Scare”—a fact she seemed to enjoy flaunting whenever she took trips to the Soviet Union and China. In the 1960s she joined the cabinet of Kwame Nkrumah, then the president of Ghana. A Communist, she became a citizen of Tanzania and died in China in 1977. Chou En Lai attended her funeral.
Any woman who divorces her first husband simply by declaring him dead is at the very least intriguing: Horne takes on a difficult subject and does a serviceable job.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8147-3615-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
PERSPECTIVES
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