With sharp research and insights, Sokol follows this blithe and self-congratulatory legacy through the election of President...
Sokol (History/Univ. of New Hampshire; There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975, 2006) exposes the troubled truth about the North’s racial integration.
The Northern states could point to the Southern states’ ongoing practices of Jim Crow legislation, white supremacist violence and suppression of voting rights with righteous disgust, but the author shows how, in unsubtle and pernicious ways, the North, too, was “at war with itself.” Sokol tracks the tireless work of a handful of reformers who helped uncover the hypocrisy of the Northeast’s practices in politics, housing and even sports. In 1939, the school superintendent of Springfield, Massachusetts, John Granrud, attempted to pioneer revolutionary hiring practices to incorporate a “crazy quilt of races, religions and ethnicities” and celebrate the plethora of differences within the student body. The school’s integration gained national notoriety and even a Hollywood film (It Happened in Springfield)—until a Democratic backlash shut it down in 1945. Claiming that there was no discrimination, the new superintendent asked, “why enact, or continue, a program to root it out?” The facts within ethnically divided neighborhoods like Brooklyn belied this smug attitude. The arrival of Jackie Robinson challenged Dodgers fans to “step away from the old prejudices,” not just in embracing the black ballplayer, but in the experience of integration in the stands at Ebbets Field. “Segregated housing,” Sokol asserts, “was the scourge of the North”—from the Robinson family’s travails at finding a welcoming community in Connecticut to the deeply divisive struggle to integrate Northeastern schools from 1957 onward. The elections of enormously influential African-Americans like Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke and New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm offered new champions to equality, while Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff challenged his colleagues to hold the mirror up to look inward and acknowledge racism’s intractable existence.
With sharp research and insights, Sokol follows this blithe and self-congratulatory legacy through the election of President Barack Obama.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0465022267
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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