Scrupulously fair and intellectually astute, Janken's (African-American Studies/Univ. of North Carolina) portrait of a lesser-known member of the black scholarly elite in the mid-20th century provides a valuable look at the man, as well as at his milieu. Although race relations in the US had been at their nadir for decades, Rayford Logan rose above his humble origins in part because his father was on the household staff of a prominent US senator—a position that protected the young Logan from the most brutal realities of a divided society. But attending Williams College in 1914 proved an eye-opener as the implications of segregation sank in, and a stint as one of Uncle Sam's segregated soldiers in WW I convinced Logan that there was a war to be waged at home. After a few congenial years in postwar Europe, he returned to America, taking up the cause of racial equality as an academic; eventually, he came to Howard University, where his reputation as a specialist in colonialism and Latin American affairs flourished. Tireless in his desegregation efforts—both as a public speaker and as chairman of the Committee for the Participation of Negroes in the National Defense Program—Logan also edited the controversial but timely What the Negro Wants (1944), a group of essays by prominent black liberals and conservatives who unanimously demanded an end to Jim Crow society. In time, however, Logan's star began to wane, and, in subsequent decades, his inability to accept the term ``black'' as a replacement for his preferred ``Negro'' hastened his isolation. A frank, well-founded assessment not only of personalities but also of agendas and the dynamics of power in the top tier of black America at midcentury.
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-87023-858-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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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