Hopelessness, anguish, and anger seethe through this riveting account, by Washington Post reporter McCall, of one man's roller- coaster rise from the violent, self-annihilating street life of his generation to a respectable position above the fray. Although raised in a solid working-class neighborhood in Portsmouth, Virginia, McCall as a 70's adolescent was not free from the hazards of his and other black communities. His mother and stepfather provided a stable home, but gang-controlled streets brought him into never-ending contact with violence and crime. As fistfights turned into gun battles and sweet-talking into gang- rape, he did his part, stealing an ice-cream truck and, while a college student, shooting an adversary point-blank in the chest. A father at 17, he turned to stickups for cash—until an arrest for armed robbery earned him a stretch in prison. There, he found more positive role models, straightening out enough to gain parole and reenter college in journalism. Jobs were not available for an ex- con, however, until an internship with a local paper turned into real work. An offer from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution followed, and McCall began a new life there with his pregnant wife-to-be; but with racial pressures no less intense in Atlanta and domestic trouble brewing, he began to lose faith, until his honesty paid off and he was hired by the Post—an achievement muted by the knowledge that most of his former friends were dead, dying, or serving time. For any who might think race relations and conditions in African-American communities have been improving since the hard-won civil-rights victories of the 50's and 60's: a devastating, full- bodied reality check.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41268-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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
PERSPECTIVES
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