A ghastly, dizzying descent into the coldblooded clannishness of the Southern racist mindset.
A dogged pursuit takes a journalist into uncomfortable corners of her Southern family’s complicity in a small-town lynching.
Both a deeply personal narrative infused with a charming Southern flavor and a compelling historical journey, this work benefits stylistically from the distance Georgia-born Branan has attained from the protagonists, her relatives. Born in 1941 and raised in Columbus, Georgia, not far from her parents’ relatives in the small town of Hamilton, Branan was properly indoctrinated as a child in segregation and made racist assumptions about the black people she lived among and who worked for her family; these attitudes took decades to unlearn as a journalist committed to civil rights and equal justice. From hints over the years that her family let slip from their carefully “embroider[ed]” memories, Branan gradually put together the facts around a grisly lynching of four blacks—including the first African-American woman to be hanged in Georgia—on Jan. 22, 1912, in Hamilton by a white posse. The murders were especially painful for the author to investigate since they occurred under the watch of the new sheriff, her great-grandfather, and were perpetrated by a group of her ancestors. As the story goes, a moonshining ne’er-do-well, Norman Hadley, had made sexual advances toward a teenage black girl of the community, prompting his murder by her protectors and thus underscoring the role of miscegenation in the twisted edifice of Southern racist thinking. In this well-written, disturbing narrative, Branan reaches back to explore numerous similar lynchings and the complicity of the entire community. She also explores the tireless work of journalists like Ida B. Wells and activist Anna Julia Cooper, who resolutely exposed the lynchings, and the members of the Women’s Missionary Society, among other women’s groups, who finally restrained the murderous hands of their menfolk.
A ghastly, dizzying descent into the coldblooded clannishness of the Southern racist mindset.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1718-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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