A footnote to Anglo-Indian history, to be sure, but a telling one, and very well done.
A carefully reconstructed story of political murder that began to unfold a century ago.
The mass killing of protestors in Amritsar on April 13, 1919, is a central moment in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi. It is also a moment enshrined in Indian memory—and, in many ways, the beginning of the end of British rule. The officer who ordered the killings, Gen. Reginald Dyer, was forever haunted by his act, writes British journalist and BBC presenter Anand (Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, 2015, etc.): “His family would always believe that he died of a broken heart” and not the cerebral hemorrhage on the death certificate. While no one can quite agree on how many died there, hundreds or thousands, one man vowed to do something to avenge them, traveling to Britain and laying a careful trap for the colonial governor who had not only authorized the killings, but spent the rest of his days defending them. It took 20 years to enact that vengeance, but, as the author writes, when Udham Singh shot Sir Michael O’Dwyer in central London, he “became the most hated man in Britain, a hero to his countrymen in India and a pawn in international politics”—lauded, among other champions, by Joseph Goebbels as a hero of the anti-British struggle. Anand painstakingly follows Singh’s long path from the killing fields of India to the Houses of Parliament and that climactic moment, which might have resulted in the deaths of many other officials had he used the right caliber for the bullets he fired. Singh was executed for his act, though supporters tried to give him the means to kill himself while in prison—and his jailers therefore even took away Singh’s glasses lest he “break one of the lenses and slit his wrists.” A memorial in Amritsar now commemorates Singh’s act, which, as Anand suggests, was far more nuanced than the simple act of assassination it was made out to be.
A footnote to Anglo-Indian history, to be sure, but a telling one, and very well done.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9570-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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