An autobiography by Moore (Take a Bishop Like Me, 1979), erstwhile Episcopal bishop of New York City, social activist, and father of nine. Born in 1919, Moore was the youngest of four children in a wealthy Yankee family, with a remote father and a loving but frail mother. His childhood was spent shuttling between the family's New Jersey home, an apartment on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, and a summer residence in Palm Beach, Fla. Following family tradition, he boarded at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, where he was drawn to High Church spirituality and had a profound experience of God's presence when he first went to confession. In 1937, again following family custom, he went off to Yale, and when war came he joined the marines. Wounded while serving in the Solomon Islands, he was sent home, and married and studied for ordination at New York's General Theological Seminary, where he was influenced by such luminaries of the time as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. After ordination, he began expressing a commitment to civil rights, forming close personal and financial links with the NAACP, and worked to change the orientation of the Episcopal Church toward social action. In 1963, he became suffragan bishop of Washington, D.C., where he wielded influence on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Subsequently, as the bishop of New York, Moore was a leader in agitating against the Vietnam War. He also worked to admit practicing gays and lesbians to the ranks of the Episcopal clergy and advocated for recognizing the plight of the homeless. Moore writes well, sharing his private thoughts with the reader and offering brief but moving details of his family life. Very much a '60s figure, Moore comes to guilt naturally over his wealthy upbringing and his church's social elitism—and he handles the guilt graciously. A revealing portrait of this controversial and influential Anglican. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-17567-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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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