An overly detailed and dated account of the ups and downs of an Illinois political campaign, possibly of interest to black...
A close-up look at the senatorial campaign of a trailblazing black female politician.
Morris (Brian Piccolo: A Short Season, 1971), the first woman to win the Ring Lardner Award for sports journalism, followed the 1992 campaign of Braun, the first black woman to become a U.S. senator. The author introduces the theme of sexual harassment with a look back at Braun’s angry comments on a PBS show about the hearings that preceded the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice. When Braun announced her candidacy, Morris, impressed, asked to follow her campaign and document it for a book. Braun agreed, and Morris kept a journal of the experience. This book is based on her journal, quotes from her interviews with the campaign staff, long statements by Braun, letters, newspaper articles, and even gossip columns from Chicago newspapers. Morris describes Braun’s campaign manager, Kgosie Matthews, to whom she could not get close, as “meticulously mannered and erudite—or rude and contemptuous.” It soon became apparent that he was not just Braun’s campaign manager, but also her lover. When staff members charged him with sexual harassment, Braun chose to reject them in order to protect the man she trusted and saw as her protector. Though she was enraged by Braun’s self-destructive behavior, Morris continued to see her as a phenomenal person with great courage and potential, and she continued to work on this book. When Braun made it clear she did not want it published, Morris concurred, not wanting to damage Braun’s career. Her decision to go public at this late date is unclear, but perhaps it is clarified by her describing this as “a cautionary tale that screams ‘hazard’ where passion and politics intersect.”
An overly detailed and dated account of the ups and downs of an Illinois political campaign, possibly of interest to black female Chicagoans, political groupies of any ilk, or feminist book clubs.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-57284-176-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Agate Midway
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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