Well-researched, but the plodding treatment keeps this powerful, important story from soaring. (4 maps, not seen)
A doctoral dissertation recycled as a literary biography of the legendary abolitionist and feminist.
Sixty years have elapsed since the last full-length portrait of Harriet Tubman (1822–1913), and first-time author Larson must be commended for uncovering many new facts about the astonishing life of a woman once called “the Black Joan of Arc” and “the Black Moses,” a woman who knew John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, and countless others involved in the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the women’s suffrage movement. Larson’s handling of these remarkable materials, however, is unrelievedly conventional and often dull; she even fails to animate Tubman’s remarkable single encounter with fellow activist Sojourner Truth. After an introductory sketch of her subject’s life, the author returns us to antebellum Maryland, where young Harriet grew up as the property of Edward Brodess, a stereotypical white slave owner. Although an 1852 fire in the Dorchester County Courthouse destroyed key documents, Larson was nonetheless able to trace the history of Tubman and her family. Harriet fled slavery in 1849, but risked her life to return numerous times (sometimes disguised as an old man) to rescue relatives and others, some 70 people in all. She became well known on the abolitionist circuit and returned to the South when the Civil War broke out to nurse the wounded, recruit freed blacks for the Union Army, and spy for the North. Amazing success greeted all her efforts, and after the war, Tubman spent years trying to coax a pension from the government. She devoted her final years to family, public speaking, and assorted social causes; slender proceeds from early biographies helped her stay alive until she finally got her pension. Unfortunately, Larson’s artless prose never equals Tubman’s achievements, and the text often resembles what it once was—an academic assignment.
Well-researched, but the plodding treatment keeps this powerful, important story from soaring. (4 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45627-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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