edited by Joshua Claybourn ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2019
A mixed-bag collection that finds the United States at a crossroads.
Edited by attorney Claybourn, this collection addresses the possibility of a shared narrative within a country divided by political polarization.
“Even if searching for a common narrative risks neglecting some current or future group,” writes the editor, “we…still recognize the value of exploring whether a unifying story can be achieved and, if so, what that story might be.” The responses are all over the map, provocatively so, with some contributors stressing how this lack of a shared story and thus a shared identity has been integral to the story of America from the start. Each state had its own story, and the country prized the sovereignty of those states over any sort of federal unity. “When Thomas Jefferson talked about ‘my country,’ he meant Virginia,” writes history professor Gordon S. Wood, who proceeds to elaborate, “people were citizens of a particular state, which is what made them citizens of the United States.” That these citizens had formerly been subjects under British rule is essential to the origin story, but some citizens have long been more equal than others, and many who lived here weren’t citizens at all. So the story must encompass the plights of slaves and their descendants, the fight for equality that remains in flux. There are many mentions of “American exceptionalism,” a term that the concluding essay by Paris-based historian Cody Delistraty notes was first used by Joseph Stalin in 1929 and has since provided something of a battlefield for sparring ideologues. Yet America remains exceptional as a country founded upon an ideal, one that could well provide a unifying spirit despite the country’s deep divisions. As Cherie Harder, who served as an assistant to both George W. and Laura Bush, writes, we must “teach and learn our story.” But what story do we teach? What story do we learn? And what story do we tell? Other notable contributors include Cass Sunstein, Alan Taylor, and David Blight.
A mixed-bag collection that finds the United States at a crossroads.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64012-170-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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