The authors have pieced together an illuminating life portrait without extraneous biographical material, focusing intensely...
A visual appreciation of “the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.”
No, that distinction does not go to Abraham Lincoln or even Mark Twain, but rather Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). In his excellent epilogue, Henry Louis Gates outlines Douglass’ love of photography, and Douglass’ great-great-great grandson Kenneth B. Morris Jr. provides the afterword. Stauffer (English, American Studies, African American Studies/Harvard Univ.; Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, 2008, etc.), Trodd (American Literature/Nottingham Univ.; A Reusable Past: Abolitionist Memory in the Long Civil Rights Movement, 2015, etc.), and Bernier (African American Studies/Univ. of Nottingham; Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin, 2015, etc.) provide an impressive collection of pictures with short descriptions of when and where the photos were taken. There are also reproductions of three of Douglass’ four speeches about photography, which give a wonderful picture of the man, his intellect, and his devotion to his main cause, abolition. Readers can feel the intensity of his love of photography and his powerful feelings about freedom. He felt that photographs were truthful images, despite the editing technology involved, and the strong effect of photos sent to the South contributed to secession. The photos of Douglass show a man as he evolved from first gaining his freedom in 1838. Most are head-and-shoulder shots, but his direct, defiant glare and his clenched fists indicate a relentlessly dedicated man who knew what he must accomplish. As his fame on the lecture circuit and his place as the foremost black leader of the 19th century grew, so the images show a dignified elder statesman who is still intense and wrathful. Also included are caricatures, sculptures, and political cartoons illustrating just how powerful the man had become.
The authors have pieced together an illuminating life portrait without extraneous biographical material, focusing intensely on their subject’s belief in the strength of photographs.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-468-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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