A worthy addition to the growing list of memoirs from world-class servants of the public.
An autobiography from one of the world's leading political figures provides a special insight into ongoing civil and human rights questions.
Oxfam International honorary president Robinson explores the events that shaped her qualifications for the role she played on the global stage. An early advocate of church/state separation and a career of legal advocacy led her first to the Irish Senate, then to the country's presidency, then to a position as the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights. Educated in Paris during the Algerian War, Robinson writes about how her views of human rights were shaped philosophically and legally: “I went back to reading about Gandhi…I read more of Martin Luther King.” This foundation stayed with her as she qualified for law degrees on both sides of the Atlantic and began to work in areas where conflict between personal morality and criminal codes became a source of unjust individual suffering. Ireland's European treaty commitments on human rights provided a lever to secure advances within her own country, which both benefited the cause of individual Irish men and women as well as people throughout Europe. Robinson describes winning Josie Airey the right to separate from an abusive husband “as the type of case [she] loved.” Successful political advocacy helped her become Ireland's first female president, and Robinson recounts how she transformed the office. Later controversies arising during the Iraq War have not undermined her international stature. She bases her view of human rights on FDR's “Four Freedoms, and she emphasizes the importance of the universal right to “decent work.”
A worthy addition to the growing list of memoirs from world-class servants of the public.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7964-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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