An unusually sympathetic record, by the victim of a historic kidnapping. Wakefield was the 33-year-old wife of a prosperous Indian Agency doctor when the so-called Dakota War broke out in Minnesota in 1862 (the war cost the lives of some 500 whites and an unknown number of Indians). A small band of Sioux captured her and her children and held them hostage for a month and a half, during which time Wakefield, an observant chronicler, noted the ways of her captors and explained their good reasons for having risen in revolt. Weighing more than 200 pounds and captured with a huge larder of food in her reservation home, Wakefield observes, ``People blame me for having sympathy for these creatures, but I take this view of the case: Suppose the same number of whites were living in sight of food, purchased with their own money, and their children dying of starvation, how long do you think they would remain quiet?'' In constant fear of enduring what the 19th century deemed ``the fate worse than death''—namely, rape—Wakefield found herself protected by the band's leader, Chaska, and no harm came to her. In the brief war's aftermath, 392 Dakotas were sentenced to hang for their role in the outbreak. President Lincoln pardoned all but 39; one of the unlucky men to hang was Chaska, Wakefield's protector, about which turn of events she is duly indignant. The editor, historian June Namias (Univ. of Alaska, Anchorage), tries a little too hard to justify this reprinting of Wakefield's intrinsically interesting document, delving into psychobiography to establish it as different from the many captivity narratives now in print, as indeed it is. But Namias does a fine job of annotating Wakefield's memoir, and her introduction provides needed context. Students of Native American and Western women's history will find this a valuable contribution. (15 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8061-2975-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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