A transplanted Southerner explores the aftermath of the 1968 shootings of unarmed black college students by highway patrolmen in his hometown of Orangeburg, S.C.
When Shuler (English/Denison Univ.; Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights, 2009, etc.) came across a copy of The Orangeburg Massacre (1970) by Jack Bass and Jack Nelson, what he read launched him on a quest to discover how the town had dealt with the event in the wake of the violence and the current status of race relations there. The author traveled to Orangeburg in 2009 and 2010 and interviewed dozens of people, including both blacks and whites who were there in 1968. Among his interviewees were businessmen, ministers, the mayor, even a highway patrolman, who happened to be the author's great-uncle. Their stories often conflict, reflecting their complicated feelings, perceptions and prejudices, the "narratives deep in the blood and bone of the community.” What is not in dispute is that many black students were injured, three were killed and nine highway patrolmen were tried and found not guilty. No compensation was made to victims' families, and one black civil-rights activist was tried, convicted of rioting, jailed and later pardoned. Although public officials have issued apologies, Shuler makes clear that the reconciliation process is long and begins with listening to and paying attention to each other's stories. Orangeburg remains a town struggling with a damaged reputation and divided by race and class. It is also, the author points out, a symptom of a larger problem across the country, which demands that we look at our history closely and come to grips with the underlying issue of racism. Filled with the voices of men and women willingly or reluctantly responding to a journalist's probing, Shuler's report paints a dark picture with glimmers of light.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61117-048-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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