A vigorous complement to other primers in political activism and social justice.
A blend of memoir and manifesto by Black Lives Matter leader King.
Born in 1979, the author was already a well-known activist, using social media for progressive causes, when a friend and Morehouse College classmate sent him a note advising him of a YouTube post showing the infamous 2014 “I can’t breathe” killing of Eric Garner by New York police. “The case and the injustice of the murder…consumed me from that day forward,” he writes. “I took it personally.” He dug deep to discover that the NYPD had banned the chokehold that killed Garner two decades earlier and discovered that police across the country “have shot and killed an average of three people a day,” most of whom never made the national news cycle, especially if they were members of ethnic minorities. Things are worse than ever, King writes, in a book that shares the spirit of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The institutions that ostensibly protect all citizens are crumbling, gradually overcome by a creeping fascism that has risen slowly and stealthily over decades. What’s to be done? “Making change isn’t theoretical,” writes the author. “You have to get out there and fight for it. You have to be in the game, in the campaign, in the war.” Of course, that fight will involve losing some battles, as King’s mentor Bernie Sanders, who provides the foreword, has experienced, and it’s likely to be met by objections on the part of well-meaning people: “Nobody believes in me,” “I’ll start later,” “I’m afraid of failure.” There’s no time for all that, and King advises instead getting out and becoming involved in grassroots movements: “Don’t be pushy to the point of weirdness, but exchange information, and let them know that you are hoping to volunteer alongside them and could start immediately.” That encouragement is welcome, and in any event, writes King, those who oppose democratic change are busy on their end: “They are not passive defenders of the status quo but deliberate, forceful advocates of it.”
A vigorous complement to other primers in political activism and social justice.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-04800-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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