Polemics overlaid on personal history—reader affinity required.
An African-American turns to genealogy to plumb the lives and times of her white Southern forebears during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
In presenting the results of exhaustive personal research into a racially mixed branch of her family tree, playwright and novelist Davis (Maker of Saints, 1996, etc.) emphasizes that her findings are hardly unique. Any African-American with kin “from the South or West way back when,” she asserts, “is likely to have family ties—black and white—to the founders of the country [as well as] the American system of bondage.” In telling the story of her search for ancestors that began with old letters, the writings of her grandmother and a strange photograph of a black child of the 19th century completely decked out in authentic tartan plaid, Davis also documents the condition of blacks making the transition from bondage to Emancipation as “freedmen and freedwomen.” (Her use of the term and its application to herself intimate that the transition is ongoing.) The story centers on the encounter in the 1870s between her African-American great-grandmother, Chloe Curry, and Will Campbell, scion of an influential white cotton-planting clan with proud Scottish roots (refugees, in fact, from the horrors of guerilla-style terrorism in Civil War Missouri). The evolution of that relationship from household employment to lifelong companionship (they never married) takes place against the cataclysmic background of failed Reconstruction in Mississippi’s Yazoo County. Burnings, shootings, lynchings and rapes were exacted against blacks who voted against the “redeeming” white supremacist ticket. The author reacts variously with shock, sarcasm and occasional vituperation as injustices surface in her research, forcing her to embrace her African heritage with vigor.
Polemics overlaid on personal history—reader affinity required.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-465-01555-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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