Brings deserved attention to the accomplishments of a dedicated, savvy man.
A solid biography of the man who headed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for nearly a quarter of a century.
What began as a doctoral dissertation for Ryan, managing editor of the Economist’s annual World In publication, is now a full-blown portrait not just of Roy Wilkins (1901–1981), a man “more comfortable walking the corridors of power than demonstrating on sidewalks,” but also of the NAACP under his leadership. A founder and driving force behind the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a powerful coalition of civil rights, labor and religious groups that coordinated lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., Wilkins worked behind the scenes to get major civil rights bills through Congress in the 1950s and ’60s. Ryan details the conflict between activist groups and the conservative Wilkins, who was convinced that the integration of blacks into American society was best achieved not through violence and demonstrations but through legislation and the courts. In his view, the militancy of the Black Power movement and the havoc of ghetto riots drove away white support, and when Martin Luther King Jr. advocated merging the civil rights movement with the peace movement, Wilkins argued against it. His problems with other civil rights leaders were mirrored by struggles within the NAACP, where tensions and feuds led to a bruising battle over his retirement and a bitter last year in office for the reluctant-to-go Wilkins. His story is full of conflict with those who differed with him, but Ryan notes that a kind of synergy was operating as well: Favorable legislation and legal rulings were necessary but no guarantee of compliance, while the moral force of protestors created an environment for legal changes. Further, the author points to the survival of the NAACP as the greatest legacy of Wilkins: While once-prominent civil rights groups have shrunk or vanished completely, the mainstream NAACP is still going strong.
Brings deserved attention to the accomplishments of a dedicated, savvy man.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8131-4379-8
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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