A poignant and warmly engaging memoir.
A distinguished Atlanta attorney remembers his lawyer father, who defended a black man against charges that he raped a white woman in pre–civil rights era Alabama.
As a young adult, Beck was struck by the similarities between his father and Atticus Finch, the main character of Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Like Finch, Foster Beck was “idealistic [and] reverent about the Constitution.” His clients included sharecroppers and farmers whom he defended against banks and who mostly compensated him in produce rather than “cash money.” Yet Foster was satisfied because he was following his conscience. When a judge called upon him to defend Charles White, a black man accused of interracial sexual assault, Foster accepted. He believed that future clients would view the fact that he had taken a difficult case—which he believed he could win—as proof of his worth as a lawyer. But Foster soon saw just how tough the case would be. Unlike other blacks he had defended, White was intimidating and demanding. Claiming he was innocent, White refused Foster’s efforts to find a solution because he would not compromise with a racist judicial system determined to send him to the electric chair. Foster found evidence that the woman White had allegedly raped was an uninjured virgin. But he still lost the case as well as the appeal that followed. Not long afterward, he lost his struggling practice as well. Beck’s claim that the highly publicized White trial may have influenced the young Harper Lee is as fascinating as it is plausible, especially given the striking similarities he notes between his father and Atticus Finch. Yet it is ultimately the generosity of spirit that infuses Beck’s recollections that is the most moving part of this memorable story.
A poignant and warmly engaging memoir.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-28582-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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