A brave, heart-rending narrative from the parents who lost their son far too soon.
The parents of Trayvon Martin (1995-2012) tell their sides of the story about his death.
In alternating points of view, Fulton and Martin narrate the events leading up to their son’s death, the trial, and the aftermath. The book is filled with the heartache and anguish only parents who have lost a child can fully understand, as the authors delve into the nitty-gritty details of what it was like to learn of their son’s death, the terrible, nightmarish quality of the days and weeks following the shooting, and the experience of going to trial only to have the killer proclaimed not guilty. They share family stories and anecdotes about Trayvon, giving readers a rounded, more complete picture of the teenager who was gunned down by a neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, on a rainy night in 2012. Their son’s death provoked anger across the country and contributed to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement, but as Fulton points out, the violence and deaths of African-Americans has hardly stopped after Trayvon. “We tell this story in the hope that it will continue the calling that Trayvon left for us to answer and that it might shine a path for others who have lost, or will lose, children to senseless violence. We tell it in the hope for healing, for bridging the divide that separates America, between races and classes, between citizens and the police,” writes the author. “Most of all, we tell it for Trayvon, whose young soul and lively spirit guide us every day in everything we do.” Fulton and Martin are not heavy-handed on the dramatics; they speak honestly and boldly and win empathy and understanding through their expression of their bleak reality. The authors also provide answers not readily found in the avalanche of news covering this story, and the book should foster further discussions on the issues of race and violence in America.
A brave, heart-rending narrative from the parents who lost their son far too soon.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9723-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
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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