Former New York Times reporter Salisbury (The New Emperors, 1992, etc.) profiles 25 individuals who have won his admiration. Nearly all the sketches are crisp and effective, but some subjects seem capriciously chosen, failing the author's own criteria: courage. Salisbury has chosen some figures who, though obscure to most readers, seem to have led exemplary lives—including Deng Pufang, who's used his position as son of China's current ruler to change his nation's attitudes about the physically disabled; Sue and Lawrence Brooks, a New England judge and his wife who tirelessly spoke out for civil rights in the US; and Sister Huang Roushan, a nun who for five decades has worked with China's despised lepers. The author is also drawn to those who exude edgy intelligence, energy, or capacity for growth, including Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Solzhenitsyn, and David Halberstam—and these sketches crackle with life (RFK was ``hard eyed, hard faced, hard minded, and thin lipped....I was certain his quick eyes did not miss a thing nor his ears a word''). Salisbury also reveals some surprising facts from his Times years, such as that then-city editor A. M. Rosenthal forbade any mention of Malcolm X in the newspaper of record. But some of the author's subjects are bound to produce head-scratching regarding their bravery: Zhou En-lai's greatest assets, for instance, seem to have been the survival skills of a ``gentleman courtier,'' and Khrushchev talked a better game against his party apparatchiks than he played. And what are we to make of this summary of the achievement of Red Storm Over China author Edgar Snow?: ``Certainly Snow could not get Mao to reveal the negatives, to detail the bloodiness of the Long March, the slaughter of the landlords, the infighting with his Russian peers. But those are details.'' Details? Lively sketches of some of the most fascinating people of our time—though a few will remain ``heroes'' to Salisbury alone. (First printing of 25,000)
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8027-1217-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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