Evidence of a life most extraordinary.
From humble beginnings, Elsie Fox fought most of her adult life to ensure fairness and equality for all, even at the risk of her freedom.
Elsie’s life story is not an archetypal American tale. Born on a remote Montana ranch in 1907, she came from modest beginnings. She barely knew her birth father and lived with a stepfather that tried to sexually molest her–learning at a young age that she could not be beholden to a man to get by in the world. After finishing two years of college, Elsie entered the workforce full time. By the mid-1920s, she found a steady job as a secretary for an advertising agency in Seattle. As an independent woman, she took full advantage of the Jazz Age, going to speakeasies, dating various men and generally having a swell time. When the Great Depression hit, Elsie fumed at life’s unfairness. During one of the “bank holidays,” she found herself at the local library and happened upon The Communist Manifesto–she was radicalized that day, and fervently believed that the communist system was the only workable system. Elsie joined the party, which became her whole world, and her life began anew. She met her husband Ernest, another true believer, at a party meeting. In spite of the danger inherent in being a card-carrying communist, Elsie only stopped her active membership when she realized that the stories of Stalin’s purges weren’t merely capitalist propaganda but the truth. However, she still believed that as an economic system communism was the right path. What sets this biography apart is its subject–still alive as of the book’s 2008 publication, readers learn about modern-day Elsie, not just through the prism of history. They meet a scrappy older woman who is as passionate about her country and the rights of its inhabitants as she has ever been.
Evidence of a life most extraordinary.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-51856-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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