A sometimes slow-moving but mostly enlightening book about a fearless man that readers should know better.
Morrison (Political Science and Public Administration/Mississippi State Univ.; African Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook, 2003) brings our belated attention to Aaron Henry (1922-1997), a man of immense talent devoted to establishing an integrated society.
The author recounts Henry’s remarkable achievements, which could easily fill volumes. Born in the Mississippi Delta, he was raised learning the methods that would enable him to change the world as he knew it. Like so many others, Henry returned from service in the Army expecting certain rights. Upset with the continuing spread of prejudice and discrimination, he opened a pharmacy in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and commenced to work for social change. He set his sights first on enfranchising Negro voters, joined the NAACP, and perfected his networking and speaking skills. Soon, he developed a successful partnership with Medgar Evers, and he and Evers successfully pushed beyond the framework of the slow-moving NAACP parent organization. The author gives only minor insights into the man and his family, sticking to his many and varied accomplishments. Occasionally, the narrative gets bogged down in his professorial style and attempt to include everything. Henry organized multiple social movements in Clarksdale, sit-ins at railway and bus stations, a boycott of Clarksdale shops that lasted for years, and protests against all segregated establishments, including churches. He also participated in the Freedom Vote Campaign. With the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Henry really blossomed. His entrepreneurial abilities, political acumen, and close connections helped secure funding for countless projects in his home state. His ability to compromise turned some against his leadership, but his successes vastly outweighed his failures. Henry not only changed the racial climate in Mississippi; he challenged the entire infrastructure.
A sometimes slow-moving but mostly enlightening book about a fearless man that readers should know better.Pub Date: June 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55728-759-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of Arkansas
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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