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MR. AND MRS. PRINCE

HOW AN EXTRAORDINARY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FAMILY MOVED OUT OF SLAVERY AND INTO LEGEND

Occasionally footloose in citing sources, Gerzina pursues a remarkable American story.

Enthusiastic research into a family of freed New England slaves reveals some unsettling truths about the treatment of blacks in colonial America.

NPR host Gerzina (English/Dartmouth; Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden, 2004, etc.) and her husband lived in Guilford, Vt., just across the mountains from the onetime home of freed slave Abijah Prince and his poet wife, Lucy Terry. Delving into the couple’s history over seven years of recondite genealogical research, the modern-day spouses’ evident excitement at unearthing threads in the Princes’ lives is infectious. Born in 1706, Prince spent his early life as the single black slave of minister Benjamin Doolittle in Northfield, Mass., before joining the army in 1747. Gerzina believes that Prince cunningly engineered his own manumission, probably by handing over his military pay to an outside buyer. Certainly he knew how to read and write and had already learned the value of legal documents. Moving in Massachusetts among a thriving “Negro network,” Prince met and courted Lucy, a much younger slave woman who had arrived from Africa in her youth and composed a now legendary poem called “Bars Fight” during the French and Indian War. The two married in 1756 and lived with their growing family in Deerfield; however, they were able to purchase various plots of land in Vermont, where the family eventually settled by the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Gerzina and her husband track the Princes’ movements through purchases, medical records and court papers, especially those documenting the antagonism between the couple and their racist white neighbor, John Noyes, who continually attacked the family in order to drive them out. Lucy argued against Noyes and took one case to the State Supreme Court, where she won. The authors effectively shatter the myth of white benevolence in favor of black ingenuity, including a surprising amount of African-American access to the judicial system.

Occasionally footloose in citing sources, Gerzina pursues a remarkable American story.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-06-051073-2

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

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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