Coleman-Adebayo’s memoir recounts the legal battle culminating in the 2002 No FEAR Act, “the first civil-rights and whistleblower act of the 21st century.”
Steeped in the history of the civil-rights and women’s movements and blessed with a keen intellect, the author earned degrees from Barnard College, Columbia University and MIT. In 1990, she was on track toward a promising career with the EPA, considered one of the most progressive federal agencies. However, Coleman-Adebayo soon sensed that all was not well. Pay discrepancies ran along racial and gender lines, and white men dominated the ranks of the executives. During a trip to South Africa as a member of the Gore-Mbeki Commission, the author witnessed the “systematic, verifiable, environmentally devastating” effects of vanadium mining, a metal considered strategic by the CIA. She was quickly stymied by her superiors in her efforts at solving the South African environmental issues. Once she reported her belief that “the EPA [was] covering up crimes…being committed by an American multinational corporation against the people of South Africa,” to the Washington Post, she became a whistleblower. Workplace retaliation was swift, resulting in her filing a complaint against the EPA. Weaving together her personal records with the transcript of the federal civil trial, in which she prevailed, the author provides an insider view of the legal tactics used at the highest level of government. Coleman-Adebayo also recounts the shenanigans surrounding the subsequent hearings and the strenuous political process involved in the unanimous passage in both houses of Congress of the No FEAR Act. Though the narrative bogs down in a large cast of characters, this is an inspiring and worthwhile trek through one woman’s brave battle against a system favoring the powerful.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55652-818-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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