A wake-up call for the American dream.
An edited transcript of a probing, provocative conversation on the national narrative in the Trump era.
To commemorate the opening of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at the New York University School of Law, founding director Thompson, a professor at the school, convened a panel including former attorney general Lynch, NAACP Legal Defense Fund president Ifill, and Equal Justice Initiative executive director Stevenson to discuss the major problems and challenges facing the country. Thompson launches the discussion by saying, “racism is embedded in the DNA of America. But while people of color have disproportionately felt its effects, it’s an American problem. In fact, it is the American problem.” Such framing is crucial because the narrative the participants hope to advance is not one of marginalized minorities but rather of the moral, economic, and human costs to the nation as a whole. Law and government play important parts in this conversation, but the discussion makes clear just how deeply embedded these problems are within American society and how solutions must be addressed in our schools, libraries, neighborhoods, and even transportation systems. As Ifill wisely notes, “people think about civil rights as something that over there, these black people are doing. And what I always want people to understand is that that kind of equality principle is actually unifying, and essential to unite us all.” The discussion presents a striking contrast between governmental initiatives today and those of the Obama administration while suggesting that if these are times of great struggle, they are also times of great determination and hope. The participants are pretty much in agreement and all on the same side, but one of the precepts of the book would seem to be that there is no other side.
A wake-up call for the American dream.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-395-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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