Will appeal to students of civil rights history and the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts.
Lauterbach (Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, 2015, etc.) examines the life of a noted African-American photographer who also worked as an informant for the FBI during the peak of the civil rights movement.
Ernest Withers (1922-2007) documented black life in Bluff City—Memphis, Tennessee, that is—as thoroughly as Addison Scurlock did in Washington, D.C., and James Van Der Zee in Harlem. “He covered the 1960s,” writes the author, “as Mathew Brady covered the 1860s.” Brady was wider ranging, but there’s no denying that Withers caught some signally important moments in the city’s history, including Elvis Presley visiting a black nightclub in June 1954, “the last month of anonymity in Elvis Presley’s existence.” Self-taught and aware of the difficulties of making a living with his camera, having worked mostly the funeral circuit, Withers became a police officer in the late 1940s after returning from service in World War II to a Memphis that, sharply divided on color lines and run by a racist white known as “Boss Crump,” was making tentative steps toward allowing black officers to work in black neighborhoods—in Withers’ case, on Memphis’ famed Beale Street. It was a time when the NAACP and other civil rights organizations worked to secretly register black voters, and some unknown person in the FBI’s Memphis office “identified Withers as a potential informant on criminal cases.” In the guise of working as a photographer, Withers recorded Martin Luther King Jr. on several occasions, including the sanitation workers’ strike at the very end of King’s life. Lauterbach is perhaps a touch forgiving of Withers’ apparent motivation, his fears that young blacks would “get a distorted view of society and are engaging in and experiencing a socialist-oriented ‘beatnik’ type experience for which they are educationally, emotionally, and culturally ill-equipped to deal," as one white FBI agent put it.
Will appeal to students of civil rights history and the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-24792-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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