A welcome reminder that America was built by immigrants in search of a better future for their children.
Moving to Houston and a job at the Chronicle in the mid-1990s, Kolker, a former globe-trotting journalist, found living in the city to be like “taking a round-the-world balloon tour of the countries that were now reshaping the United States.”
The grandchild of Ukrainian Jews on her father’s side and daughter of a Mexican-born mother, the author admits to a longtime fascination with the lives of immigrants, and this led her to start a new beat at the paper, reporting on the lives of immigrants living in her community. She was struck by a 1986 study that showed greater longevity among Latino immigrants than Native Americans despite greater obesity, less education and lower income. This was confirmed in 2010 by the Centers for Disease Control, which established similar results with West Indians, Asians and recently arrived Africans. What was their secret? Many of the people the author interviewed were friends, and she questioned them about those customs from the old country that they valued most highly. Their answers not only led to her writing this sparkling debut, but they significantly transformed her life. She includes explanations of not only how immigrants adjust to their new lives, but what they can teach us. Kolker focuses on six customs, many of which she adopted: a money club to which members contribute on a monthly basis without expecting interest; a six-week period when family and friends pitch in to allow a mother to rest after birth; assisted marriages involving family members who help find and vet a potential spouse; parent-supported tutorial programs; multigenerational families who live together, including adult children as well as the elderly; and family dinners amid a supportive community.
A welcome reminder that America was built by immigrants in search of a better future for their children.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8682-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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