A slender, forceful volume from Pulitzer-winning historian McFeely (Grant, 1981; Sapelo’s People, 1994) that examines the work of Stephen Bright’s Southern Center for Human Rights in defending the indigent of Death Row against the state’s killing apparatus. McFeely encountered Bright when solicited for testimony in a death-case appeal regarding the symbolic implications of the Confederate flag’s placement within the Georgia flag. Intrigued by Bright’s creativity in countermanding his clients” sentences, and startled by his quasi-Gothic encounter with death penalty reality, he’s produced an analysis of this seemingly quixotic fight on behalf of the condemned. Following Bright’s maxim that even murderers possess more humanity than their worst action indicates, McFeely succeeds in both illuminating Bright’s often scorned work and portraying the penalty’s effect on all those it ensnares, including jurors, families of victims and perpetrators, and sundry protesters. In keeping with his title, McFeely endeavors to discern the life in the midst of the mainstreamed execution culture of the southern “death belt.” His findings are unsettling: for example, the travails of a man whose 1977 death sentence is only commuted via a 1991 Bright-helmed retrial subtly evoke the absurdly timeless terror such inmates experience. Additionally, this historian discerns without rhetorical overkill the deeply race- and class-based inequities that have long compromised the application of capital punishment. He explores how public enthusiasm for it rises in times of war or domestic upheaval, and finds that generally, its application is determined by such factors as local outrage, political expedience, and initially poor legal representation. Also within is a provocative, disturbing portrayal of how determined southern legislators forced an end-run around the Supreme Court’s seemingly impermeable 1972 decision against capital punishment. McFeely succeeds in paying tribute to the maverick attorneys who pursue this unpopular, unremunerative work so vital to constitutional interests. He succeeds equally in his consideration of how this quintessentially American punishment stabs at the souls of all citizens, not least those who regard it as natural and just.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04819-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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