Serviceable but undistinguished fare for those disinclined to read more substantial texts.
Concise biography of the famed civil-rights leader.
Sitkoff (History/Univ. of New Hampshire; The Struggle for Black Equality, 1945–1992, 1993, etc.) covers familiar ground in an easy-to-read book that traces the life of Martin Luther King Jr. from his 1929 birth in segregated Atlanta to his assassination in 1968 on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Setting King against the backdrop of the already well-documented racial conflicts of his times, the author chronicles in unaffected prose the events that garnered the Baptist minister the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize and made him a target of U.S. government-sanctioned surveillance and attacks. (Sitkoff notes that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover routinely referred to King as “burrhead,” among other invectives.) The text revisits the highlights: the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that catapulted King to national attention; the 1963 March on Washington at which he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech; the Birmingham church bombing that rocked King’s faith in nonviolent protest; and finally, the political pressures that put him in the firing line of gunman James Earl Ray. In sure-to-be-contentious passages about King’s string of extramarital affairs, Sitkoff cites a long tradition of infidelity among black preachers. Regrettably, the author offers no views on the conspiracy theories that continue to swirl around Ray, who later recanted his guilty plea and died in prison in 1998. The recent deaths of King’s daughter Yolanda and wife Coretta—whose 1969 memoir My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr. merits a wider readership—are likely to prompt franker, more compelling books than this competent summary of previous scholarship. A lengthy bibliographical essay cites as references scores of King-related works, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographies by Taylor Branch and David Garrow.
Serviceable but undistinguished fare for those disinclined to read more substantial texts.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9516-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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