Beals had one story to tell, and she told it five years ago in her award-winning Warriors Don—t Cry. Elvis was all the rage. Eisenhower was the president. Women wore crinolines, and blacks and whites snarled at one another from a safe, segregated distance. After making history more than 40 years ago as one of nine students to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School, all else may have appeared pretty pedestrian for Beals. Or so it would seem. The memoirist reports in this sequel to Warriors Don—t Cry that the reason she never completed her studies at Central High was a fluke: She had been tipped off to danger by an unlikely source. That source, a fair-skinned cousin passing for white, had risen to some prominence in the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the word among his fellow Klansmen was that death would come to the five students who remained at the school if they insisted on getting an integrated education. Beals fled to Santa Rosa, a small town near San Francisco, where she completed her segregated education, albeit in more friendly surroundings. Most striking in her account is how life changed for her after moving to the coast. She fell in love with a white man, and though adjusting to the North posed its own set of problems, she seems to have found the close equivalent of domestic bliss: “I began losing weight. I no longer craved junk food to fill the empty spot in my soul.” But she avoided political activism at all costs. The Black Panthers; the free speech movement on several college campuses at the time—none of that attracted her. Little Rock had been enough. She settled into a private life of marriage, separation, welfare, and then divorce. Later, she claimed a new life as a journalist—making this an account of the fairly routine stuff of a black woman coming of age in the North.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-14464-1
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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
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