A thoughtful historical study of the entrenched symbolism of a dreaded bridge in Mississippi, a landmark that “fixed...
History of the most notorious sites in Mississippi for white-on-black violence, from 1918 to 1966.
A place of enormous symbolic power, the Shubuta bridge over the Chickasawhay River, in Clarke County, Mississippi, became the most heinous “monument to Jim Crow,” the site of numerous lynchings of African-Americans by white mobs. In this painstaking study spanning decades, Ward (History/Mississippi State Univ., Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965, 2011, etc.) delves into the specifics of the gruesome crimes and the crusading work by journalists and NAACP activists like Walter F. White to expose the lynchings in the South. Waves of violence between the white supremacists and the black Mississippians who had seen their promise of freedom betrayed after Reconstruction broke out during moments of crisis, as Ward notes, especially following three eras of global war. The first, in 1918, a quadruple hanging of two brothers and two sisters (both pregnant) from the bridge, followed the murder of the young women’s boss as an attempt at protecting their honor. White, a black man who could pass for white, went undercover in Shubuta to expose the lynchings, but he was unable to publish the terrible details in mainstream magazines. In October 1942, the bridge was again the site of a lynching, this time of two teenage boys. Ward sees the violence as a reflection of white wartime anxiety over the fear of losing control of black workers, who were fleeing to the North. The Mississippi violence prompted renewed attempts at anti-lynching legislation in Congress. Finally, in 1966, after successive civil rights bills, the small but growing presence of the NAACP in Clarke County helped crack the widespread fear of registering to vote “or joining up with anything smacking of civil rights.”
A thoughtful historical study of the entrenched symbolism of a dreaded bridge in Mississippi, a landmark that “fixed attention on Jim Crow’s brutal excesses and unresolved legacies.”Pub Date: May 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-937656-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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