A thorough study of madness.
Sobering account of a 1940 bookstore raid that unleashed a fury of protest from civil libertarians and a flurry of support from the political right.
On August 17, Oklahoma City police officers entered the Progressive Bookstore at 129½ West Grand. Proprietor Bob Wood (an alias) was secretary of the state Communist Party, and most of the shop’s customers were either party members or sympathizers. The police arrested everyone inside and seized cartons of material, some expected (Marx et al.), some worthy of a lifted eyebrow (biographies of Jefferson and Dickens). Indictments and trials followed. In their debut volume, the husband-and-wife team of Shirley A. Wiegand (Law/Marquette Univ.) and Wayne A. Wiegand (American Studies/Florida State Univ.) follow an unsurprising arc from the raids and the reactions through the trials to the aftermath, providing plenty of human interest along the way. The accused were convicted of violating Oklahoma’s “syndicalism laws,” which banned speech of any sort calling for the overthrow of the government. Juries often took very little time to deliberate before handing down guilty verdicts with recommendations for the maximum sentence: a $5,000 fine and 10 years in the penitentiary. Judges were happy to accommodate. News of the Oklahoma doings spread quickly. The ACLU supported the defendants; Woody Guthrie wrote songs for them; Richard Wright, Lillian Hellman and other writers protested the trials; the Eastern presses rolled with words of condemnation. On the other side, the KKK and like-minded allies donned their actual and metaphorical white robes. All the convictions were eventually reversed on appeal, but the authors point out that the determination of some government officials to ignore the inconvenient Bill of Rights is still very much with us.
A thorough study of madness.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8061-3868-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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