A fact-filled, if flatly executed, attempt to uncover the truth behind an American legend, by Kansas City Star reporter Kasper. Relying largely on Oakley's own scrapbooks, Kasper reveals a complex character far removed from the rough Western tomboy mythologized in popular lore. Born Phoebe Ann Moses to a Quaker farming family in Ohio, Oakley (1860-1926) discovered her lifelong passion and extraordinary talent at age eight after sneaking off with her father's hunting rifle. When she was 20, local farmers pitted her against circus sharpshooter Frank Butler in an impromptu contest. Winning both the match and her rival's heart, Oakley (who married Butler) soon gained a career when she stepped in for her new husband's ailing partner. In 1886, with Butler now serving as devoted manager and assistant, Oakley joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Petite and slender, clad in a prettily embroidered skirt and blowing kisses, the ``prim'' star used ``humor, pantomime, and drama''—along with astounding shooting prowess—to captivate audiences in America and Europe for 17 years, finally retiring with dignity and self-made fortune intact. Kasper pointedly emphasizes the ``paradox'' informing both Oakley's appeal and her place as a ``symbol of the liberated woman.'' Conservative and proper, she was appalled by bloomers and uncertain about women's suffrage—but, at the same time, she was a feminist ``despite herself,'' constantly proving the truth of her statement that women could equal men in anything ``outside of heavy, manual labor.'' Despite first-rate research, though, Kasper fails for the most part to go past quotes and chronology to the deeper historical and personal analysis necessary to animate Oakley and her world. The result is an admirable but unsatisfying sketch. A bit wide of the mark but with a worthy enough target to warrant readers giving it a shot. (Thirty illustrations.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8061-2418-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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