King’s analysis of social issues, as delineated in Laurent’s useful reappraisal, seems as relevant today.
In her debut book, Laurent (American Studies/Paris Institute of Political Studies) draws on extensive research into Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings, speeches, and papers as well as archival and published sources to make a strong argument that his campaign for social justice went beyond race to encompass broad, transformative social and economic changes for all poor Americans.
As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson points out in the foreword, historians and civil rights activists, deeming King’s Poor People’s Campaign a failure, “have failed to capture the import of King’s reframing of the civil rights movement in economic and redistributive terms.” Laurent takes her title from Michael Harrington’s 1962 book The Other America, which incited a renewed concern for poverty among social scientists, economists, and politicians, including President John F. Kennedy. In 1967, King gave two sermons titled “The Other America” and asked Harrington to write the blueprint for the Poor People’s Campaign. Laurent emphasizes the historical and intellectual underpinnings for King’s thoughts about poverty, particularly Frederick Douglass, “who ushered in a tradition of black radical thought dedicated to the idea of substantive justice,” and W.E.B. Du Bois, who believed that racial equality could not be achieved without social and economic equality. Among King’s contemporaries, Laurent cites John Kenneth Galbraith and Gunnar Myrdal as strong influences. “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism,” King said, “but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” He called for “broad structural reforms, addressing joblessness and lack of public resources in the American ghetto.” Among those resources were adequate housing, public mass transit (to help poor people get to jobs outside of the inner city), and education. Laurent praises King—a bit too repetitively—for his “clairvoyant analyses,” prescient intuition, and insights that were echoed by later economists and social scientists—and by current reformers calling for “a Marshall Plan for American’s poor.”
King’s analysis of social issues, as delineated in Laurent’s useful reappraisal, seems as relevant today.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-520-28857-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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