Reading Ted Poston’s life story is akin to reading several small chapters in American history. Poston, the first black to integrate an all-white daily newspaper—the then respectably liberal New York Post in 1935—was a glib, street-smart raconteur, fond of women and fonder still of alcoholic beverages, a man equally comfortable chatting with Harlem street folk and conducting policy discussions in President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,”of which he was an active member. In a career that spanned more than 40 years, some of the highlights included coverage of the Scottsboro Boys trial (nine young black men were charged with raping two white women); the school desegregation case leading to the landmark 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education; the Emmett Till lynching trial; and former governor George Wallace’s famous stand inside an Alabama school door as he attempted to block blacks from entering. Poston died in 1974. But while he lived, he enjoyed first-name-basis relationships with all the major civil rights figures. Later, he served as elder statesman and tutor to many young black journalists. Independent scholar Hauke has spent a decade piecing together Poston’s life from archives, oral histories, and interviews; she offers a marvelous blend of the historical and the anecdotal. In her view, Poston was an enormously complex man whose quick wit and acerbic humor often disguised an embittered soul. He drank and smoked too much, married three times, and kept several women on the side. But nowhere does Hauke say or suggest that Poston ever pitied himself or whined about his lot as an African-American. A gem of a book on a remarkable person—and his age. (24 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8203-2020-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
Did you like this book?
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
GET IT
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. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
