An historic but often tedious collection of short writings by Ovington (18651951), a white settlement worker who was a founder and longtime officer of the NAACP. These pieces (originally published in the Baltimore Afro- American newspaper in 193233) consist mostly of personal reminiscences that depict race relations and the status of African- Americans in the early part of the century. In 1908, Ovington, then in her mid-30s, moved into the Tuskegee Apartments in San Juan Hill, a poor Manhattan neighborhood where, as the only white person in the area, she observed the everyday lives of working-class blacks. While the black family was basically intact, black women, who often worked as domestics, were frequently away from home. ``The absence of the mother from the home led to juvenile delinquency,'' wrote Ovington. ``More than white children, colored boys and girls came before the juvenile courts for improper guardianship.'' As for the men, too many of them could not get jobs or secure employment that was not ``hateful.'' They often depended on the women to support them while they lounged on the street or frequented pool halls. Ovington worked to mobilize northerners to improve the lot of blacks in a time when most white northerners ``easily excused'' lynchings as a legitimate response to charges of rape. Nor did northerners see harm in racist films like Birth of a Nation, a dramatization of educated black men lusting after southern white girls, who are rescued by the Ku Klux Klan. Nobody rescues a black rape victim in ``The White Brute,'' a short story that adds some much-needed life to this plodding collection. (Editor Luker is coeditor of volumes I and II of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.) This book loses more than it gains by its historicity, and it lacks insight into both the general topic of American race relations and the dynamics of Ovington's own life.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55861-099-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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