by Irwin Redlener ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2017
Motivating and immensely uplifting; an engaging intimate memoir about impassioned connectedness with children in dire need.
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Inspiring words from a global champion who believes in “fulfilling the promises and potential of all children.”
Since the early 1970s, Redlener (Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do, 2006), a Brooklyn-born pediatrician and social justice advocate, has fought for the rights of children and has stationed himself on the front lines of the worldwide fight against poverty. He chronicles his activism through years of medical training and service and describes his altruistic work in some of the most impoverished communities stateside and abroad. On the threshold of immense success in medicine, Redlener, a man “easily seduced by serendipity,” writes of sacrificing a high-tech pediatric cardiology fellowship to accept a directorship at a clinic in rural Arkansas, where poverty, racism, and ignorance fueled attempts to discourage his efforts. In the mid-1980s, Redlener worked with the star-studded “We Are the World” campaign to end starvation in sub-Saharan Africa by helping channel donations toward areas where help was needed most. Perhaps Redlener’s most prized achievement and the one that put his name on the radar of pediatric poverty activism was his 1987 collaboration with his health care administrator wife, Karen Redlener, and singer Paul Simon in the creation of the Children’s Health Fund, established after the author witnessed the condition of children living in Manhattan’s Martinique Hotel homeless shelter. Written with compassion and honesty, Redlener’s memoir documents the ways humans can work collaboratively for the greater good. The voices of the many at-risk children who’ve received Redlener’s help echo throughout the text alongside pages of anecdotes from his global work. Illustrating the years throughout his career is a centerfold section of photographs. Readers eager to discover better ways to become involved in the global poverty crisis will find Redlener’s motivating history a terrific jumping-off point.
Motivating and immensely uplifting; an engaging intimate memoir about impassioned connectedness with children in dire need.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-17756-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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