A modern, inspiring companion to such works as Claude Browne’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on...
Autobiography of the former gang leader and prison activist, executed in 2005.
Williams, who spent a quarter-century on death row, doesn’t blame the whole of his criminal past on society, though he promptly identifies as contributing factors institutional racism and the absence of a father. (“My memories of him were so remote that I could not have recognized him in a jailhouse line-up,” he writes.) A transplant from New Orleans to South Central Los Angeles, Williams spent his teenage years in what he calls a “blue rage” of maladjustment, rising in the ranks of the rapidly emerging Crips gang. One gateway to the criminal schoolyard, he writes in a moment that will resonate with those who follow the headlines, was dog-fighting. Williams’s job was to feed, water and patch up the often-mauled contestants, who would be slaughtered when they could no longer fight. “At first the sight of the blood, gore, and loss of body parts was sickening, and I felt pity for the injured dogs,” he writes. “But I became hardened to the gruesome scenes.” On to humans, from street-fighting to more deadly games, about which Williams writes matter-of-factly: “throughout the entire battle gunshots were fired, but our only goal was to beat them into submission”; “being viewed as maniacal or whacked out fed my ego.” Redemption comes with his arrival on San Quentin’s death row following a murder conviction. “Though nobody believed me,” he writes, “I proclaimed my innocence from the beginning, and I’ll never stop doing so.” Believe Williams or not, his account of educating himself behind bars and enlisting prisoners and free citizens alike in the cause of keeping others out of gangs and jail is quite affecting. A particularly moving moment comes when he meets his own son passing through San Quentin on the way to another prison.
A modern, inspiring companion to such works as Claude Browne’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4449-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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