In this compelling memoir of his early life, the president of Sinn FÇin, the political wing of the IRA, recalls the development of the modern ``Troubles'' in Northern Ireland and his own central role in them, culminating in the tragic hunger strike by incarcerated IRA members in 1981. Born in 1948, Adams vividly recalls the Belfast of his early life as a coldly sectarian place. It was polarized between the loyalist majority, many of whose members belonged to anti-Catholic organizations like the Orange Order, and impoverished Catholics, who were unable to speak freely, were not allowed the right to display nationalist symbols, and were often denied equal opportunity in housing and employment. Adams traces his growing political consciousness to routine events in Northern Ireland: The annual parades of unionists on July 12, the banning of republican activities, and the activities of violent unionist paramilitary organizations like the B Specials. Dissatisfaction over a lack of democracy found expression in protests over grim state-sponsored housing units and the banning of nationalist parades. The unionist forces reacted violently, and the situation exploded into civil war. Adams describes his growing radicalization, his leadership role in the political wing of the IRA, and the British use of secret courts to convict republicans. Adams was himself a political prisoner, one of the first in the infamous Long Kesh, and underwent torture at the hands of the British authorities, which he describes graphically. Adams concludes his account by recording the dramatic hunger strikes of Bobby Sands and others in 198081, which he initially resisted but which he now recognizes as having revitalized the nationalist movement. Adams was elected a British MP in 1983, part of a pattern of Sinn FÇin electoral success that resulted in the recent Anglo-Irish agreement. An eloquent and persuasive presentation of recent Irish history. (For the life of an earlier Irish rebel, see John Mackay's Michael Collins, p. 1656.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14312-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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