Readers will sense that these hopeful passages are very early chapters in the young minister’s life story.
A distant descendent of the famous Confederate general wrestles with his family’s legacy.
Lee IV (Stained-Glass Millennials, 2017) terms this memoir “my letter of love to a place that has shaped me” while acknowledging that such love hasn’t always been reciprocated and that he is likely to rile those who resist the call to heal the region’s abundant racial wounds. The author caused a significant stir when he broadcast his views on racism in the Southern church, creating a controversy that spurred his resignation from the North Carolina church where he had been pastor, his first such assignment, in a town unaccustomed to such scrutiny. (One wonders if the national media attention would have been as bright without Lee’s name recognition.) After a foreword by the Rev. Bernice A. King, daughter of Martin, the author chronicles what it was like growing up in the South as a Lee, with a photo of the man they called “Uncle Bob” in his bedroom next to a Confederate flag. Though his parents were both progressive and pro-integration, he dealt with the mixed messages sent through his formative years with a black nanny, who would never sit at the table to eat a meal with him; his visits to Civil War memorials and battle re-enactments; and his realization that the man he had once idolized, and had been idolized throughout the region, had become “an idol of white supremacy…an idol of nationalism and of bigotry and of hate and of racism.” Things came to a head for the author, as they did for the nation, at Charlottesville in August 2017, where the battle over Confederate statues turned uglier and one woman lost her life. Lee received more calls to speak out, which caused him to lose his pulpit but gain a larger following.
Readers will sense that these hopeful passages are very early chapters in the young minister’s life story.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57638-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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