An unsettling demonstration of how a paranoid, reactionary government can treat significant artists.
An exposé of the governmental surveillance of James Baldwin (1924-1987), annotated by an accomplished literary scholar.
Maxwell (English and African-American Studies/Washington Univ.; F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, 2015, etc.) appreciates Baldwin’s radicalism, noting that he “often looks like today's most vital and most cherished new African American author.” The author argues that young black activists are particularly moved by him: “The impression that Baldwin has returned to preeminence, unbowed and unwrinkled, reflects his special ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter.” Yet, Maxwell sees an absurdist cautionary tale in how J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI obsessively shadowed Baldwin, with equal astuteness and incompetence, due to his political outspokenness and sexual frankness. Baldwin’s FBI file, updated through 1974, was the largest compiled on any African-American author. Since it was declassified following a 1998 court challenge (though still redacted), the file is a bizarre testament to governmental overreach. Maxwell presents the actual documentation in chronological order, using brief discussions to provide valuable context. Baldwin first attracted interest following the success of The Fire Next Time, his 1963 account of the early civil rights movement; he was first photographed by the FBI during protests in Selma that fall. Baldwin’s articulate discussion of the movement ironically made him a target, and he landed on Hoover’s “Security Index” of potential threats. As Maxwell notes, “the Bureau turned the tools and fruits of his literary success into investigative weapons against him.” Baldwin was well-aware of the scrutiny and baited the FBI with a long-promised but never-delivered book about their antagonism toward the black community. By 1968, the FBI was attempting to track Baldwin (now a reclusive expatriate) while focusing more on the black radicalism symbolized by the Malcom X murder and the Black Panthers. Maxwell adeptly curates the strange hoard of documentation, but the primary sources will be most appreciated by completists.
An unsettling demonstration of how a paranoid, reactionary government can treat significant artists.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-737-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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