Schrank’s autobiography would be a yawner—yet another memoir of a radical who decided to get comfortable—if he weren’t a good storyteller and if he didn’t write from the point of view of a union member and organizer. Schrank, now a management consultant, joined the Young Communist League in 1934 as a teenage high school dropout, but with a solid grounding in radical ideas from his anarchist father. As a member of the working class in a party filled with intellectuals, and with his natural talents for organizing and public speaking, Schrank was a prized recruit. His value to the party increased when he became president of his machinists— union local in New York City, then organized a statewide council of machinists’ locals, of which he also became president. But then the machinists were swept up in Cold War anticommunist fervor; Schrank was expelled from the union in 1950, despite landmark victories in a series of court battles, and his disillusionment with the Communist Party, from which he resigned in 1948, grew. He went back to factory work for a few years, won a hard-fought victory organizing copper miners in Montana for the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers’ union, then went over to the other side, eventually becoming a corporate executive. When the book ends in 1965, Schrank, at 48, has just graduated from college and left his long-suffering wife, and he thanks his therapist for keeping him from suicide. Schrank says this book is a product of his therapy, and the worst parts—his preoccupation with sex, his psychological ruminations about his parents—read that way. His descriptions of how both the Communist Party and the American worker let him down smack of the bitterness of a disappointed lover. But there are also wonderfully told stories here that are a textbook on how to organize everything from a street-corner rally to a union.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-262-19389-2
Page Count: 452
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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