The author’s talents as a historian far outweigh his abilities as an autobiographer.
A long-time Newsweek journalist piggybacks his life’s story onto the most important news event of his career: the turbulent drama of the civil rights movement.
Unfortunately, though, Fleming’s brilliance as a journalist is strangely at odds with his weakness as a memoirist. Clearly more comfortable recalling the violence of the struggle for racial equality, he offers vibrant portraits of the most harrowing incidents of that era, including the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, the investigation into the disappearance of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., and the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. These sections stand out with sharp observations of body language, vocal inflections, political maneuvering, street theater and the steely determination of both civil rights agitators and segregationist status quo enforcers to plant their politics on the landscape. Strangely, though, Fleming’s attempt to tell his personal story is less compelling. Born in 1927 in North Carolina, raised for most of his childhood in a Methodist orphanage (even though his mother was still alive and healthy), he escaped poverty and isolation through a late-teens stint in the Navy and then became a reporter. Yet he fails to enrich the account of his own life with the kind of revealing detail he brings to his historic coverage. The two stories that brought him his greatest national exposure, as the victim of a vicious assault during the 1966 Watts riots and one of those fooled by the D.B. Cooper hoax, are presented in an antiseptic and detached manner. His narrative of the post-Newsweek years sweeps along in an elusive rush lacking emotion and specificity; he casually, almost accidentally, drops in an account of being hospitalized and treated with electroshock therapy. It would seem the story of Fleming’s life is the dramatic news events he covered, not the life itself.
The author’s talents as a historian far outweigh his abilities as an autobiographer.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-58648-296-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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