An informative and brisk biography of a courageous journalist, by the senior US senator from Illinois, a follow-up to Simon's 1964 YA biography (Martyr to Freedom, not reviewed). Himself a former newspaper editor, Simon (Winners and Losers, 1989, etc.) assays the life and career of Elijah Lovejoy. Born in Maine in 1802 and educated at what is today Colby College, Lovejoy decided to seek his fortune in the West. A determined youth despite his supposedly frail constitution, he walked to Missouri when he could afford no other form of transportation. In St. Louis, he worked as a teacher but quickly became dissatisfied with the profession. He bought a half-interest in the St. Louis Times in 1830 and became its editor. At first he opposed the abolitionism of radicals like William Lloyd Garrison, favoring the repatriation of blacks to Africa, but by 1834, two years after he left the Times and eight months after he started a new paper called the Observer, he had decided that ``slavery as it now exists among us, must cease to exist.'' His abolitionist views and rabid anti-Catholicism soon brought him into conflict with slavery-supporting St. Louisans, and the Observer's offices were vandalized and much of the printing equipment destroyed. Lovejoy moved to Illinois, a free state where he thought he would receive a better hearing. His attacks on involuntary servitude encountered the same hostility there, however, since the state had been settled mostly by Southerners. He died in 1837, two days before his 35th birthday, defending his press against a drunken mob. Was he a zealot and a madman, or a visionary and martyr? Or, like John Brown, was he perhaps both at once? Simon attempts to answer these and other questions about a stubborn and courageous man whose story deserves to be more widely known. Enlightening and accessible to any reader interested in the struggle against slavery and for civil liberties.
Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-8093-1940-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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