An eye-opener for those who remember the ’60s; for everyone else, a welcome introduction to that tumultuous time as...
Rich in yippie/hippie goodness, a scrapbooklike biography of the agitator and gadfly who went from the barricades to Wall Street—and ticked everybody off at every point along the way.
Mention the word “yippie” to a person of a certain age, and the first person who comes to mind will most likely be Abbie Hoffman. That’s not quite fair, writes music and pop-culture journalist Thomas (Listen, Whitey!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975, 2012, etc.): “Abbie was a fan of Jerry before Jerry even knew Abbie existed.” Active in leftist politics since the early 1960s, Rubin (1938-1994) was a Zelig of dissent, everywhere at once, influential to everyone he met—including soon-to-be-former Beatle John Lennon and a re-emerging Bob Dylan. Rubin was also one of the Chicago Eight, a guy with an FBI file a foot thick, under suspicion for every sort of mayhem, including a presumed threat to lace the water supply of the Windy City with enough LSD to send every Chicagoan on an intergalactic trip. (Here, Thomas helpfully fact-checks: “it would take five tons of acid to effectively contaminate the water supply,” showing just how outlandish the government’s investigations could get back in the day.) As the author writes, sardonically, Rubin was so controversial that his prep school didn’t invite him back for the 25th anniversary—but enshrined him as one of the class heroes at the 50th, by which time he had come back from living underground and become an investment banker, earning the enmity of many erstwhile comrades. Things did not end well for Rubin, author of the famed take-it-to-the-man countercultural manifesto Do It! Thomas’s oversized, overstuffed book, studded with photos and news clippings, charts that unlikely trajectory, noting, sympathetically, that “no matter who Jerry was at any given moment…it was never a put-on.”
An eye-opener for those who remember the ’60s; for everyone else, a welcome introduction to that tumultuous time as illustrated through one of its most memorable personalities.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60699-892-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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