An intriguing glance at a complex and countercultural personality.
The tempestuous life of 20th-century America’s archprogressive, Dorothy Day (1897-1980).
Loughery (Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America, 2018) and Randolph (Amelia Earhart, 1990, etc.) provide a serviceable and largely balanced look at one of America’s most complex and socially influential figures. The authors begin with a protracted exploration of Day’s young adulthood, a period rife with cross-county moves, love affairs, and interactions with World War I–era radicals. Her development as a writer, thinker, and activist is intertwined with sometimes-salacious tales of her relationships with intelligent but immature men who too often caused her great pain. Eventually, Day’s plunge into Catholicism redirected her passions while confusing her friends and family. The authors move on to discuss Day’s encounter with mystic wanderer Peter Maurin and the ensuing creation of the Catholic Worker, at once a publication, a collection of communal homes, and a way of life. Moving through the militant 1930s and the desperate 1940s, the authors do a good job of locating Day’s life and work in the midst of a wide variety of colorful characters and contentious controversies. Day was a polarizing figure seemingly with everyone: the church, the government, and fellow activists alike. This reality did not abate as the century matured, though Day’s name moved on from being an FBI target to having near-celebrity status. Though Loughery and Randolph’s work does not provide the personal depth of Kate Hennessy’s exceptional Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (2017), they do provide an excellent record of Day’s involvement in the progressive circles of her time. The authors touch on countless personalities within Day’s sphere of influence and use her as a focal point in their exploration of issues ranging from homelessness to homosexuality and historical events ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Spanish Civil War.
An intriguing glance at a complex and countercultural personality.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982103-49-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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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