A candent, mordant tribute to left-wing America.
Rambling, revelatory story of two anarchists: one dead, the other very much alive and full of pizzazz, despite his protestations.
Journalist/poet Ross (Tonatiuh’s People, not reviewed, etc.) gets together with the buried remains of E.B. Schnaubelt, an anarcho-syndicalist gunned down by henchmen of a California timber baron, on the site of the latter’s cenotaph. The pair reflect and joust over revolutionary matters, fueled by dago red. In a voice that rolls like the tall grass prairie, swept by the breeze of doing right and saving grace, they talk of their respective roots in the Communes of 1848 and 1872, or as a young citizen of Greenwich Village’s Little Red Schoolhouse (“whose façade was painted the color of its politics”). Schnaubelt played a pivotal role in the Haymarket bombing of 1886, and many bombings would come in its wake as explosives became the furious tool of choice for insurrectionists from Wobblies to Weatherpeople. Schnaubelt speaks his mind, while Ross spills his beans. Of his ratty husband- and fatherhood, the (live) author remarks, “We ran off to Mexico and had kids, some of whom are still alive. She suffered me as an arrogant, blitzed young man wild to become the white Rimbaud (Bob Kaufman was already the black one).” As the book ebbs and flows, with “testimonies” from Emma Goldman, Bill Hayward, Sacco, and Vanzetti, a vivid picture emerges of Ross’s association with the left, nitty-gritty and unpretty but better than the prevailing political current. And Ross is still at it: after all the myriad screw-ups, the sad stint with the Progressive Labor Party, the halfway houses for addiction, he retained enough conviction to volunteer as a human shield in Baghdad, an abhorrence of Hussein be damned. True and dubious, colorful and carrying, Ross’s prose breaks like a wave, a great booming salute to radicalism that is, for all its missteps, still an inspiring force.
A candent, mordant tribute to left-wing America.Pub Date: June 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-578-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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