Stronger in research than storytelling, Adler reveals the man beneath the myth, detailing the life that spawned the legend.
Well-researched revelations about the union martyr and prolific protest songwriter.
If Labor Day were a gift-giving occasion, this biography of Joe Hill by freelance writer Adler (Mollie’s Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line, 2000, etc.) would top this year’s holiday list. As the author notes, the man who was executed in 1915 for a murder he didn’t commit now seems “to float with Paul Bunyan and John Henry and Johnny Appleseed in a celestial realm somewhere between fiction and legend.” The Swedish immigrant was complicit in that mythmaking, insisting he defend himself against charges of killing a grocer (where there was no motive or evidence tying him to the scene), then offering little defense and finally demanding a new trial rather than settling for the pardon he might well have received (his thousands of advocates included President Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller). But somewhere during his incarceration, Hill decided that he was worth more to the labor movement dead than alive. He refused to explain the only evidence against him, a gunshot wound suffered on the night of the crime, most likely inflicted by a friend who had been engaged to a woman they both coveted; her letter explaining the details is one of the keys unearthed by the Adler’s five years of research. Hill’s story remains inextricably linked with that of the IWW—the International Workers of the World (or “Wobblies”)—notorious as America’s most radical union of the early 20th century. Not only did it embrace the foreign and unskilled, but rather than campaigning for better wages, it urged the abolishment of the wage system. Yet what ultimately distinguished the Wobblies was their celebration of “the power of song” in galvanizing a movement. While the Wobblies are a dim memory, and Hill has become better known through a song eulogizing him than any he wrote, he remains a seminal influence on musical activism from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger through Bob Dylan.
Stronger in research than storytelling, Adler reveals the man beneath the myth, detailing the life that spawned the legend.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59691-696-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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