An evenhanded assessment of “a likable narcissist” who, the author maintains, changed Americans’ perceptions of racial...
The making of the author of “the two most important works in black culture in the twentieth century.”
Alex Haley (1921-1992) rose to fame with two books, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) and Roots (1976), the basis of a miniseries viewed by as many as 130 million. Norrell (History/Univ. of Tennessee; Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington, 2009, etc.) brings a broad background in African-American history to this well-researched portrait of a controversial writer. Haley’s early publications appeared in Reader’s Digest, for which he wrote profiles of “talented African Americans who had overcome great obstacles and remained humble, unchanged by great success.” His breakthrough project, however, focused on a far different man: Malcolm X, the incendiary spokesman of the Black Muslims. Malcolm allowed Haley to write his autobiography, subject to his approval. “A writer is what I want, not an interpreter,” Malcolm declared. Malcolm’s biographer, Manning Marable, described Haley as “opportunistic, bourgeois, and politically conservative” compared to his subject, and Norrell agrees that Haley aimed “to maximize both its sensational value and its commercial success.” Praised by most reviewers, the book sold 2 million copies in its first years. Still, Haley was always in debt, eager for publishing contracts and speaking gigs “to address his financial woes.” He once proposed a self-help book aimed at white readers called “How to Co-Exist with Negroes.” A more salable project was his own family’s history, beginning with their roots in Africa. Haley’s editors at Doubleday questioned whether the book was fact or fiction since some passages “were based on Haley’s guessing about facts and eliding evidence.” The decision to call it nonfiction, Norrell asserts, was a mistake and opened Haley up to charges of misrepresentation. The scandal that ensued dogged him for the rest of his career.
An evenhanded assessment of “a likable narcissist” who, the author maintains, changed Americans’ perceptions of racial history.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-137-27960-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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