Although marketed as a “balanced biography,” this effort reads more like an extended piece of promotional material paid for by either the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce or Griffin Bell’s law firm for distribution to potential clients. Former Atlanta Constitution editor Reg Murphy (The Southern Strategy, 1971) has obvious affection for Bell, a man who sprang from modest rural Georgia roots to become one of the country’s most successful lawyers: federal judge, United States Attorney General under President Carter, and managing partner of Atlanta’s largest law firm. As Murphy tells the tale, Bell’s life, which has spanned most of the century, mirrors the development of the nation and, more specifically, the South. Like his native region, Bell’s career has forced him to confront difficult historical realities, particularly segregation. As a federal judge, Bell played a major role in enforcing the Supreme Court’s desegregation directives. Unfortunately, Murphy chooses to avoid the moral ambiguities that pervade Bell’s life (or, for that matter, any white Southerner’s life during the evolution of the civil rights movement). For instance, Bell acquiesced when his friend Ernest Vandiver pandered to segregationists during a campaign for governor with the phrase, “No, not one,” which alluded to the number of black children who would attend white schools under a Vandiver administration. Rather than discuss the trade-offs that Bell made in the hope of encouraging enlightened policies, Murphy brushes past the subject with the comment that Vandiver ’showed great courage in dealing with desegregation issues, but black voters never forgave him for the phrase.” On the level of personal relationships, Murphy shows himself to be equally simplistic: “Griffin Bell was not a fellow to take it easy, and his wife was wise enough to help without carping about the time his practice took.” Griffin Bell has lived a complex life; it deserves a more thoughtful assessment.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1999
ISBN: 1-56352-582-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Longstreet
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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