A reserved, rather sketchy autobiography by the man whose nomination to succeed Joycelyn Elders as surgeon general was defeated in 1995. Foster keeps his emotions well in check while describing his childhood as a middle-class, achievement-oriented black youth in the segregated South of the 1930s and '40s, and his experiences as a medical student at the virtually all-white University of Arkansas in the 1950s. After completing his residency, Foster moved rapidly up the career ladder, becoming chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Tuskegee Institute's hospital, the center of medical care for Alabama's poor black population. His innovative tiered system of health care services based on outreach clinics soon became the model for other states and led to Foster's election to the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine, where he was asked to study the health effects of legalized abortion. He was later tapped by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to direct a project on how to consolidate health services for high-risk adolescents, which led eventually to his ``I Have a Future'' program, based in Nashville's public housing projects. Clearly a public-spirited citizen and compassionate physician, Foster recounts his professional accomplishments with quiet pride, but his personal life remains pretty much a closed book. In his later chapters, however, the man himself finally becomes visible. When his nomination as surgeon general ran into opposition from antiabortion forces, the inexplicably naive Foster received a bruising education in politics, and he's still stinging from it. He hasn't given up wanting to make a difference, however. As President Clinton's senior advisor for teen pregnancy and youth issues, he concludes here with a candid assessment of the country's public health needs and a ``domestic medical Marshall Plan'' to deal with them. A rich, full life that deserves a more complete telling. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: June 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82685-2
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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