Students of 1960s anti-war movements and civil rights history will find useful information in this revealing footnote.
As reconstructed by his daughter, the life of an undercover police officer present at the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The famous photograph of a mortally wounded King on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis shows three people pointing at the window where the bullet came from and one man kneeling at King’s side. The kneeling man was Marrell “Mac” McCullough, then an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department, later a CIA officer. “Dad came and went, but the black-and-white image of horror remained, unalterable and mute,” writes litigator and essayist Seletzky, who excavates the facts of her father’s life, many of which he was reluctant to discuss for reasons both personal and professional. Many questions remain: Mac, for instance, remembers the smell of gunpowder at the site of King’s murder, leading him to suspect that an exploding bullet was involved. At the time, that material was only available to the military, leading eyewitness Andrew Young to tell the author, “I don’t want to be in a position to think that high officials in our government arranged to kill my friend.” Mac was called before congressional investigators who questioned whether he himself was involved in the assassination. We will likely never know whether the government or Memphis police had anything to do with the murder, and, to judge by his daughter’s account, Mac is the kind of man who will take secrets to his grave. Fully aware through hard personal experience of Southern racism, why was McCullough so willing to act as a spy among Black Power student groups? Seletzky’s approach is nuanced, weaving her father's story and its many loose threads into her own—e.g., when she considers the racism of his era in light of the present and “the creeping feeling that I had more neighbors supporting Trump than I’d ever imagined.”
Students of 1960s anti-war movements and civil rights history will find useful information in this revealing footnote.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781640094727
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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