A biography that somewhat illuminates a multifaceted figure, although key questions remain unanswered.
Clarke (History/Jacksonville Univ.; Alliance of Colored People, 2011) presents a biography of his grandfather Protestant fundraiser Dr. J. Calvitt Clarke.
The elder Clarke was born in 1887 in Brooklyn, New York. He enjoyed the amusements of Coney Island in his youth, dropped out of public school at age 14, and learned from working as an office boy “how the lack of money can be inconvenient.” He later attended various schools, worked on freighters in the Great Lakes, and eventually became an ordained minister. In this position, he revealed himself as someone who could both entertain and persuade. In 1914, he took to the pulpit at the Christian Church in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and his sermons drew praise in the Indiana Evening Gazette. In time, he would use his strength as an orator to help raise money for charitable causes, such as Armenians in peril during World War I. He later turned to fundraising full-time and founded a Christian organization devoted to helping children abroad. The book explores the elder Clarke’s fundraising in depth; however, the story is most intriguing when examining his “second life of great merit”: his vocation as a writer. He published a number of novels under pseudonyms—many of them racy romances, such as Tenement Girl and Boarding House Blonde. In a novel titled The Slaves of Ishtar, the author says, “Clarke married debauchery with mysticism and demonic human sacrifice.” The fact that a respected Christian fundraiser had a side job writing about “demonic human sacrifice” is an astounding revelation that makes this biography a worthwhile read. Indeed, further exploration of the novels would have been revealing and welcome. However, the author leaves things vague about how aware the elder Clarke’s colleagues were of his writings; it’s also not made clear how the fundraiser managed to write so prolifically while engaged in his other activities. The author adroitly describes his subject’s charity work, but it won’t strike readers’ imaginations the way that the unpublished futuristic novel Doctor Time does, with its assortment of utopian oddities.
A biography that somewhat illuminates a multifaceted figure, although key questions remain unanswered.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5548-9
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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