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TO THE PROMISED LAND

MARTIN LUTHER KING AND THE FIGHT FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE

Less a revisionist history of King than a worthy look at a seldom-documented portion of his agenda.

A former civil rights organizer continues his studies about Martin Luther King Jr. by focusing on King’s insistence that all Americans receive a living wage for their work.

Honey (Humanities/Univ. of Washington, Tacoma; Going Down the Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, 2007, etc.) makes the case that King stood for far more than racial integration, which included legal rights and voting rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Taking a deep dive into King’s publicly delivered speeches, published writings, and unpublished notes, the author shows his subject’s zealous commitment to organizing low-income individuals into certified or informal labor unions, not only to raise poverty-level wages, but also to close the huge earnings gap between bosses and their employees. King’s effort eventually coalesced into the Poor People’s Campaign. Honey notes King’s prescience as an opponent of modern-day exploitative racial capitalism. When he was assassinated in 1968, he was visiting Memphis to support striking sanitation workers regarding collective bargaining for better wages, job safety, and replacement of abusive supervisors. “Some saw the strike of garbage and street and sewer workers as a small story, but…King elevated it as part of an epochal movement for human freedom,” writes the author. Throughout the book, Honey mixes King’s policy platforms with well-known biographical material, thus interrupting the focus on policy. Honey is especially avid in describing the attempted takedowns of King by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Honey also continually mentions the well-known premonitions by King that he would die prematurely and violently, his tactics grounded in nonviolence, and his speechmaking eloquence. Whenever the author regains his focus on King’s policies, the book tends to be revelatory—especially since income inequality has become a major touchstone 50 years after King’s assassination. Honey expresses disappointment that King’s campaign for economic justice has stalled, with labor unions disappearing along with American-based manufacturing jobs.

Less a revisionist history of King than a worthy look at a seldom-documented portion of his agenda.

Pub Date: April 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-393-65126-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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