An important work by an eyewitness to the events of the 20th century.
Personal history from a towering figure in U.S. historical circles and a key player in our current understanding of race in America.
“Born in 1915, I grew up in a racial climate that was stifling to my senses,” Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom, 2000) writes. Here the scholar explores the issue of race in America through his own experience. He recalls his parents' long-distance relationship, necessitated by poverty (few people wanted to hire his father, a black lawyer, for fear of losing the jury's sympathy), his college days at Fisk, the failure of his first proposal to the woman who became his wife and his son's first words. He offers a staggering list of professional successes, achieved through a combination of high intelligence, relentless drive and a strong sense of social responsibility. (The reader will search in vain for any other secrets to his success.) Franklin decided early on that he wanted to reach the pinnacle of scholarship. He secured a Ph.D. from Harvard (at age 26, no less), broke the color barrier as a tenure-track professor at multiple institutions, consulted with Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education and served on the Fulbright board, heading President Clinton's Initiative on Race. Among the stories of prejudice Franklin recalls is the time he attempted to serve in World War II, only to be told that, while there was a desperate need for soldiers, the policy was to limit blacks to menial positions. Says Franklin: “During my life it has been necessary to work not only as hard as my energies would permit, but to do it as regularly and as consistently as humanly possible.”
An important work by an eyewitness to the events of the 20th century.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-29944-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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