An excellent read for anyone who lived through that time, or readers interested in the history of abortion.
Physician Edelin recounts his famous abortion trial in this gripping memoir.
In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, pro-life groups scrambled to skirt the Supreme Court ruling. One tactic employed by conservative district attorneys was to criminally charge doctors who performed abortions for their by-now legal operations. Though almost no one charged was indicted, latent racism and Catholic-dominated government made for a more dangerous environment in Boston. Edelin, a well-respected, black OB/GYN at Boston City Hospital, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Charged with manslaughter by conniving district attorney Newman Flanagan for a routine procedure, Edelin was indicted and formally tried in what was considered a test case for the future of women’s rights. Edelin sketches the circumstances splendidly, providing a brief history of abortion as well as giving background on Boston’s roiling social chaos in the early ’70s. The case itself–memorable to anyone who lived through that time period–constitutes the bulk of the book. The author reconstructs events not only from his memory but also from courtroom transcripts. For the most part, Edelin works with aplomb, though his insistence on phonetically representing Flanagan’s Boston accent becomes wearisome. He is less successful in his efforts to inject his personal life into the narrative. Descriptions of his marriage woes seem like afterthoughts, and the running theme of his mother’s death from cancer–his reason for wanting to be a doctor in the first place–while tragic, is not without melodrama. Wisely, though, Edelin largely focuses on the mockery of the trial itself, from the unfair jury-selection process–which resulted in a jury comprised of almost all white men–and obvious sympathetic leanings of the assigned judge, to the guilty verdict and its eventual overturn on appeal, creating a page-turning courtroom drama that would make Grisham proud.
An excellent read for anyone who lived through that time, or readers interested in the history of abortion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-979-20600-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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