Rather heavy on political details, but Johnson’s appealing voice and youthful humor will earn readers’ admiration.
The oral history of 94-year-old Nellie Stone Johnson, an African-American who spent her life advocating equal rights,
organizing labor, and heralding education. Born on a farm in Lakeville, Minnesota, in 1905, Johnson was the oldest of nine children. She rode horses at six, drove a car at seven, and milked 30 cows a day when she was 12. With charm and intelligence, Johnson shares nearly a century of vivid memories of her immersion in political life—as a child, she watched her father help organize a cooperative associate for dairy farmers, and in 1998 she witnessed the election of Governor Jesse Ventura. Forced to fend for herself at an early age, Johnson took a job at the Minneapolis Athletic Club and recruited employees to join the labor union (of which she would eventually become vice president) as they rode the elevator she operated. Never religious, she describes her selfless outlook best by declaring, —you could almost call politics my religion, my God." Throughout her life, Johnson "never had time for a man," and her most important relationships were with fellow political progressives—whom she casually refers to as "Thurgood" (Marshall) or "Hubert" (Humphrey), among others. With lively anecdotes and sharp hindsight, Johnson describes her election to the Minneapolis library board, the seamstress business she set up and ran for years, her position on the state college board, the scholarship fund she established, and the many political campaigns she worked on. From beginning to end, she maintains a clear, conversational tone and a striking optimism toward her life’s work and ideals: "For people who tell me about the demise of politics, I tell them to drop dead."
Rather heavy on political details, but Johnson’s appealing voice and youthful humor will earn readers’ admiration.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-886913-35-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Ruminator Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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