by Scott E. Casper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2008
An unexpected, revealing look at an enduring and complex national symbol through the lives of those who knew it best.
A historian celebrates the lives of African-Americans who made George Washington’s home—their home and workplace, as well—into an American Mecca.
How is it that the name of a woman who lived longer at Mount Vernon than Martha Washington appears nowhere on those hallowed grounds? Although Washington’s will famously freed his slaves, that act did not end slavery at Mount Vernon—not all slaves there belonged to him—nor did it extinguish a continuing African-American presence at a private home destined to become a sacred, public place. Unprepared to handle the hordes of visitors expecting to see the key to the Bastille or the great man’s tomb, a succession of family heirs also continually sold off surrounding property to hang on to the increasingly unproductive plantation. In 1858, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA), leading the first nationwide historic preservation movement, purchased the grounds to prevent any further dilapidation and to restore Washington’s home to its former glory. The combined efforts of the slaves who worked the property—whose names are preserved and honored today at Mount Vernon—and the MVLA’s subsequent, celebrated fund-raising and supervision maintained Mount Vernon for posterity. Casper (History/Univ. of Nevada, Reno; Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, 1999, etc.) supplies the details of Sarah Johnson’s life—the estate’s American flag flew at half-mast to commemorate her death in 1920—and those of her family, friends and contemporaries. He recalls their daily routines, explains how they handled a series of innovations—personal photography, steamboats, streetcars—that marked tourism through the years, demonstrates how they interpreted the shrine to generations of visitors and shows how they were misinterpreted by the crowds who visited the famous Potomac site. Casper refuses to dodge the problematic issues posed by Mount Vernon for African-Americans, addressing them squarely as he honors the service of those whom history has forgotten.
An unexpected, revealing look at an enduring and complex national symbol through the lives of those who knew it best.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-8414-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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