A freedom fighter’s passionate memoir from the trenches.
A victim of Nazi terror who became a Freedom Summer volunteer in rural Mississippi re-creates the conviction of the activists’ early civil rights struggles.
The author of an earlier memoir of her half-Jewish family’s persecution in Germany during World War II (The Hands of War, 2013), Ingram focuses here on her experience in her 20s, when she was caught up in issues of social justice first in New York City and then in Washington, D.C., and Mississippi. Having been imbued by her atheist father with the “sacred and secular duty to oppose racism wherever [she] encountered it,” Ingram was deeply troubled by the enormous chasm in inequality between blacks and whites in New York, where she lived and worked in her early 20s. Befriending African-Americans yet not allowed to take them to the same establishments or live in the same buildings, the author was outraged by the racial discrimination prevalent even among so-called enlightened people. With her new husband, Daniel, a Southern-born journalist of labor-relations law, she moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. The group worked for the integration of institutions and against housing discrimination, which, as Ingram discovered, was the most pernicious form of racial inequality. As part of the circle of activists, she chronicles meeting many of the lights of the movement and working for the enormous success of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963. The next summer, on the bus back from the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, Fannie Lou Hamer convinced the author she should go to rural Mississippi to register voters and start a Freedom School. Throughout this brief book, Ingram’s anecdotes are charming, and her memories of a deeply traumatized rural South provide a significant, moving record.
A freedom fighter’s passionate memoir from the trenches.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63220-289-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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