The third entry in the current ``Evers/Beckwith: What It All Means About the South'' derby, following Adam Nossiter's Of Long History and Reed Massengill's Portrait of a Racist (both 1994). Vollers, a freelance journalist, is a stylish writer and a good researcher. She gets plenty of factual detail and psychological insight into her biographical portraits of the main players: Medgar Evers, the Mississippi civil rights leader murdered in 1963; Byron De La Beckwith, the outspoken racist finally convicted of the murder in 1994 after two earlier mistrials; and others, such as Justice Department attorney John Doar and Hinds County, Miss., investigators Charlie Crisco and Bobby DeLaughter, who unearthed the evidence that brought Beckwith to trial for the third time. Her accounts of all three trials illuminate how the criminal justice system is dependent on the idiosyncrasies of prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys. The opening chapter describing an uninvited visit to Beckwith—high-spirited despite his incarceration, casually spouting racist epithets against Jews as well as blacks—sets the stage nicely, although anyone who has read Nossiter's account of a similar encounter will have a sense of dÇjÖ vu. Vollers slips in only two major respects: She portrays Beckwith as typical of white Southern bigotry, when in fact he was beyond the pale; and she succumbs to the temptation to offer well- worn generalizations about the tormented south that add nothing to our understanding of the case. The last sentence of the book is typical of her overreaching: Afer the trial, ``...what remained was still Mississippi, haunted ground: a place at war with its own history and destined to repeat its past, like a soul being reborn again and again until it gets it right.'' For those who know little about the Evers-Beckwith story, a book worth reading; for those familiar with earlier works or the more than 30 years of media coverage, not much revelatory here.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-91485-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
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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