A gratifying, agenda-free story, effortlessly sweeping away tendentious criticisms of a first-rate American thinker and...
A perspicuous charting of the pilgrim’s progress that was Jane Addams’s hopeful, generous life.
Social activists get buffeted around more than most after they die both by their detractors and their champions. Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics/Univ. of Chicago; Real Politics, 1997, etc.) works hard, and successfully, here to clarify Addams’s goals in opening Hull House, the great settlement house in Chicago, and more generally in leading the life she chose. She persuasively establishes Addams’s importance as a social theorist, though that aspect of her work has sustained the most consistent attacks, by deploying extensive passages from her writings and speeches to illustrate her freethinking approach and her frequent eloquence. Elshtain has no difficulty dismissing the specious accusations of condescension, cultural fascism, and racism that have been leveled at Addams. Nor is it difficult to understand why her defense of anarchists, her peace activities, and her defense of immigrants and aliens won her such calumny. But her account of the founding of Hull House—beginning with what influenced Addams’s vision of it, from George Eliot to the social gospel—most decisively displays the great reformer’s empathy and humility and best explains how she could open the eyes of so many others to their abilities and possibilities. It is as difficult to imagine such an establishment now as it must have been wonderful to see it then: a place “available to any and all citizens of a city, including bewildered newcomers,” where hospitality, education, art classes, avenues of debate, even a bath, could be found along with childcare, union organizing, theatrical performances—the whole political and civic life of Chicago. “One is left nearly breathless,” Elshtain concludes.
A gratifying, agenda-free story, effortlessly sweeping away tendentious criticisms of a first-rate American thinker and activist. (8-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-465-01912-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
