by Studs Terkel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2007
History from a highly personal point of view, by one who has helped make it.
The father of popular oral history turns 95 and finally turns the microphone on himself to craft an emotionally charged (but never sentimental), politically charged (but never formulaic) and energy-charged account of his days.
A Chicago institution, Terkel (Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, 2001, etc.) calls himself a “radical conservative,” adding, “I want to conserve the blue of the skies, the potability of our drinking water, the First Amendment of the Constitution, and whatever sanity we have left.” Getting to that position has required a long apprenticeship, beginning in an immigrant Chicago with a tailor father and a seamstress mother from the Jewish Old World. Chicago was a city of gangsters and speakeasies, of marked divisions between newcomers and natives. It was a city of radical politics and labor activism, a different place from today’s city, which is very much like any other—for, as Terkel laments, “the unique landmarks of American cities have been replaced by Golden Arches, Red Lobsters, Pizza Huts and Marriotts, so you can no longer tell one neon wilderness from another.” That’s not just an old codger’s cry for an irrecoverable golden age, though. As he writes, “I don’t want to romanticize the past, become an old reactionary, an old fart saying, ‘In the good old days. . .’ There were bad old days, too.” Indeed, Terkel harbors little nostalgia, especially for the McCarthyite days in which he, though a popular DJ, was hounded from the airwaves for political reasons. He had his revenge, a tale unfolded in one of the more pleasing of the many pleasing anecdotes in this leisurely paced congeries of stories within stories. Whether recounting the lives of working people, getting inside the heads of political leaders or interrogating history, Terkel is a self-aware and self-effacing presence who happily knows he has been at the center of many things—stories he gladly tells.
History from a highly personal point of view, by one who has helped make it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59558-043-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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