From former Los Angeles Times editorial writer Mills (A Place in the News, 1988)—a biography more fulsome than definitive of civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. The 20th child of dirt-poor black Mississippi sharecroppers, and with little schooling, Hamer was an unlikely candidate for greatness—but in the late 60's and early 70's, she came to symbolize black efforts to achieve full political and economical participation in the South. In 1962, the 44-year-old Hamer attended a meeting of the Freedom Riders—a meeting that, aimed at organizing black voter registration, would lead to her addressing the Democratic Convention, to national awards, and to invitations to the White House—as well as to jail and a severe beating. Deeply religious and known for her powerful singing (the book's title comes from her favorite freedom song), Hamer challenged the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic Convention and the legitimacy of Mississippi's congressional representatives; continued to register voters; ran for Congress against segregationist stalwarts; and called for an end to poverty. Ensuing civil-rights legislation vindicated her efforts, but, by the early 70's, her radicalism—she was against the Vietnam War and favored land redistribution—had alienated many of her supporters. She was, however, as Andrew Young eulogized at her funeral, a woman ``who had the nerve to shake the foundations of this nation.'' Understandably partisan, though a more objective assessment would better serve the indomitable Fannie. Still: a useful reminder of a not-so-distant past, as well as a—perhaps unintentional- -primer on the realities of fame and politics. (Photos—16 pp. b&w- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93501-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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
PERSPECTIVES
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