Engaging, intelligent, and likely to be of much interest to general readers, as well as of value in courses in American...
A finely rendered portrait of two Southern abolitionists and civil-rights activists, and of the time in which they lived.
Journalist Perry (Conceived in Liberty, 1997, etc.) traces the evolution of the Grimké sisters, Angelina and Sarah, from antebellum Charleston liberals to influential Philadelphia reformists over the space of a few short years, sent there by a voice from heaven that instructed the Quaker spinster Sarah to “Go north. Go north.” Their abandonment of their home was a long time coming, but no surprise: Perry relates that young Sarah’s father caught her teaching a slave how to read, “in violation of the family’s traditions, Southern customs, and the strict slave codes of the state,” and that Angelina was quick to join her sister in rejecting the traditions of their state, family, and class. Their efforts, though little celebrated in standard texts of 19th-century history, were of great importance in forging the abolitionist cause through the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. More than reporting the details of the Grimké sisters’ lives and deeds, interesting enough though they are, Perry offers a learned survey of American social history in the mid-19th century, providing a vivid account of the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening and connecting the quest of their contemporaries for earthly salvation to the sisters’ thwarted determination to lead lives of religious devotion. Perry also does a nice job of introducing what would become a life-altering discovery for the sisters after the Civil War: the fact that their brother had fathered children with a “free person of color,” two of whom would, with the sisters’ help, go on to become important figures in the post-Reconstruction civil-rights movement.
Engaging, intelligent, and likely to be of much interest to general readers, as well as of value in courses in American history, women’s studies, and African American studies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03011-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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