A remarkable behind-the-scenes look at race relations and the ways in which American foreign policy is crafted and, most importantly, changed. In an era in which apathy colludes with Americans' increasing interest in putting themselves first to create an America of near strangers, this book provides inspirational proof that we not only can but must fight the racial status quo. Robinson, the product of a family of doers (his brother, Max Robinson, was a successful TV broadcaster before he died from AIDS), has had a stunning impact on American race relations in recent decades. In 1977 he founded TransAfrica, the first organization devoted solely to raising awareness of and influencing foreign policies toward African and Caribbean peoples. Under his direction, it has grown from a two-person organization to a national lobbying group with more than 15,000 members. More importantly, it has almost single-handedly helped change the course of history, thanks in no small part to Robinson's drive and remarkable focus. Among the organization's accomplishments thus far: convincing American politicians to invoke economic sanctions against South Africa, helping to free Nelson Mandela, and pushing President Clinton to provide better treatment for Haitian refugees in America and to force the exile of that country's military dictators so that President Aristide could return from his exile. A driven man, Robinson has used everything from savvy public relations maneuvers—in his years as a community activist in Boston, he once stuck 1,000 black crosses in the snow on Harvard's campus to press the university to divest its portfolio of Gulf Oil stock—to hunger strikes to get what he thinks is fair. At once provoking and poignant, this memoir reminds the reader of the value of getting justice rather than simply getting mad. (First serial to Essence)
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-94402-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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