A fair-minded memoir and portrayal of an exceptionally divisive civil rights–era politician.
A segregationist’s daughter recalls growing up on the wrong side of history in her debut memoir.
Kennedy, who lives in Montgomery, Alabama, makes it clear that she has no plans to whitewash the legacy of her father, four-term Alabama governor George Wallace (1919-1998), who proclaimed: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” The author writes that when Wallace denied any role in the brutal assaults on civil rights marchers in Selma, on the day known as Bloody Sunday, he resembled “Pontius Pilate washing his hands” of guilt. However, she tries gently to correct a few misperceptions of her father. When Wallace renounced his views on segregation after an assassination attempt left him a paraplegic, many observers saw it as another crass political move, but the author notes that in private conversations late in life, he was sincerely “ashamed and regretful.” She also shows poignantly the toll his actions took on his family and draws parallels between his tactics and those of Donald Trump. Before Wallace persuaded the Alabama legislature to change the law to allow him to serve more than one term as governor, he had his wife, Lurleen, run as his stand-in despite a recent diagnosis of uterine cancer; she died after 15 months in office. The author has suffered from chronic depression and received electroconvulsive therapy for “reactive psychosis caused by stress” even as she’s tried to ease others’ pain through civil rights activism. She doesn’t say whether the ECT helped or how she evolved from loyal daughter to social justice advocate—did she have a Damascene moment?—two of many subjects on which she seems to repress as much as express. Kennedy tells her story well, but she leaves the impression that—whether because of her Southern good manners or because some subjects are still too painful to talk about—her history involves more than she can yet say.
A fair-minded memoir and portrayal of an exceptionally divisive civil rights–era politician.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-365-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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