A brief encapsulation of the fury and disillusionment that characterized the career of this significant American activist.
Biography of an important early-20th-century labor and human rights activist known as the East Side Joan of Arc, now sadly neglected. This is the latest in the Lives of American Women series.
A radical agitator and later devoted member of the U.S. Communist Party, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964) was notorious in her day, stretching from 1906, when she first began speaking publicly against the capitalist exploitation of the working class at age 16, until her death in the Soviet Union at age 74. Vapnek (History/St. John’s Univ.; Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920, 2009, etc.) sketches Flynn’s radical activity within the context of ongoing labor struggles and the rise and fall of sympathy for the socialist cause in the first half of the century. Indeed, Flynn had gotten arrested and imprisoned numerous times in her career. Her longest incarceration occurred during the fraught McCarthy era of the early 1950s, when she served more than two years at West Virginia’s Alderson Female Penitentiary for “conspiracy” as a CP leader. Flynn’s Irish immigrant parents fostered her early free-thinking radicalism; members of the Knights of Labor, they moved from New England to the Bronx to find work, lived among the struggling poor and were compelled by the revolutionary message of socialism. From her first public speech, “What Socialism Will Do for Women,” Flynn gained the notice of leaders like anarchist Emma Goldman and Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World. Becoming a first-rate Wobbly “jawsmith,” Flynn traveled widely for the IWW, dropped out of high school, got married and had a child, whom she deposited with her family in the Bronx while she pursued her trailblazing work for the right of free speech and the strikers. Flynn denounced the violence that beset the struggle and did not work for women’s suffrage, although she believed fiercely in women’s equality, free love and birth control.
A brief encapsulation of the fury and disillusionment that characterized the career of this significant American activist.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8133-4809-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Westview/Perseus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
