Enriching, deeply personal history.
A sweeping look at nearly 200 years on a Southern plantation, told by a descendant of the slaves who lived there.
Historian Baker explains that his 30-year project documenting Wessyngton Plantation in northwest Tennessee began in the 1970s. Intrigued by an 1891 photograph in his seventh-grade social-studies textbook of four well-dressed, dignified African-Americans, he soon discovered that two of the former slaves in the picture were his great-great-grandparents. They had lived at Wessyngton, a huge plantation that in its heyday spanned thousands of acres and was a major producer of tobacco and other crops, all harvested by a slave labor force that included the author’s relatives. That revelation spurred Baker to interview former Wessyngton inhabitants and dig through massive records kept by the plantation’s owners, now in the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville. The result is not only an exhaustive, meticulous history of Baker’s family—his one-on-one interviews with elderly family members are particularly vivid and revealing—but also a portrait of what it was like to be a slave, and a former slave, in the pre– and post–Civil War South. One fascinating section reveals how Wessyngton slaves found opportunities to worship together despite the ban on congregating in large numbers (slaveowners feared rebellion). The songs they sang while toiling in the fields communicated the secret locations where that night’s service would be held. Baker also learned that one of his distant relatives was probably a white slaveowner, and that his great-great-grandfather was among the many slaves who ran away with the Union Army. The sheer amount of detail here can be daunting, but it is always riveting, and the importance of Baker’s research can’t be overstated. As one of his interviewees put it, “Our people need to know what all those people went through back then for us to get where we are now, especially the young folks.”
Enriching, deeply personal history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6740-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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