A worthy memoir of dark times, full of practical lessons for resistance and community organizing today.
A Holocaust survivor recounts life lessons of use to the latter-day downtrodden.
Born Szmulek Rosental in Lodz, Poland, Ross, founder of the New England Holocaust Memorial, was a young boy when the Germans arrived and set about destroying Jewish homes and killing Jewish men, women, and children. An early victim, he writes, was a grandmother who was thrown from a high window after failing to produce hidden treasures quickly enough. Ross quickly came to a realization: “God will not protect us.” Left to his own devices, he grew up too quickly in a sequence of concentration camps yet lived to tell the tale. Under the aegis of postwar relief organizations, he came to the United States after the war ended, followed later by a surviving brother. A born negotiator, he excelled at practical politics, which stood him in good stead in social work and later as an administrator in Boston’s city government, in charge of education in underserved communities where education was not a given. One of the highlights of the book is the author’s account of strong-arming an unwilling admissions officer into admitting ghetto kids into a storied top-tier school: “I will bring you six qualified students, and you will let them take summer classes here. On a scholarship. If they are successful, you can enroll them in school here and either pay for their tuition or provide them with aid tied to a job here on campus.” Ross adds that he had a newspaper reporter in tow to chronicle the outcome of the meeting, a fine bit of blackmail that worked. The author emerges as a resilient character who is determined not to allow the enemies of the past to re-emerge in the present unchallenged; his book opens with a cri de coeur on Charlottesville, and it ends with a defiant testimonial: “I am a survivor.”
A worthy memoir of dark times, full of practical lessons for resistance and community organizing today.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-51304-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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