A David and Goliath story in which Goliath wins.
An African-American washerwoman seeks justice from an entrenched government.
Legal historian and activist Berry (History/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of American Justice, 1999) unearths the tale of Callie House (1861–1928), a forgotten figure of post-Reconstruction history. The period of House’s youth, writes Berry, is considered the nadir of civil rights, “the lowest point along the long, rough road African Americans had traveled since Emancipation,” when poll taxes, literacy tests and discriminatory legislation barred blacks from voting and withheld other rights; at the same time, the federal government defaulted on its promises to grant land and financial relief to former slaves while granting amnesty to former slaveholders, even encouraging those former slaves to return to the old plantations to work as laborers. Against this climate, House founded the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association to advance proposed reparations that linked payments to those born into slavery to pensions paid to former Union soldiers. The movement, writes Berry, found opposition on all sides, and many prominent African-American newspapers and politicians derided House’s efforts as “a distraction from the struggle for political rights and a hopeless cause.” More ominously, postal officials in Tennessee, where House lived, suppressed the movement, prosecuting House for mail fraud as she solicited funds to support the organization. Though the government’s case was weak, House was imprisoned for a time, working alongside the anarchist Emma Goldman as a prison seamstress. Her movement fell into disrepair, and House lived out the last years of her life in obscurity. Berry’s careful consideration of these events is of much use to historians of the early civil-rights movement; of more interest to general readers is her epilogue, linking House’s efforts to current ones to seek financial compensation for the descendants of slaves.
A David and Goliath story in which Goliath wins.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4003-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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