A cogently narrated personal exploration of the pain of raising black boys in a society that the author sees as fearing black men and indifferent to their survival. In the face of chilling statistics (the leading cause of death among American black males under 21 is homicide), novelist Golden (Creative Writing/George Mason Univ.; ed. Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues, 1993, etc.) examines her tumultuous experience raising her son, Michael. She begins motherhood in Nigeria, having moved there to be with her Nigerian-born husband, Femi, and his family. But as an educated woman and a feminist, she is unable to reconcile her love of Femi's caring, tribal community with its treatment of women. She also struggles with Femi's own unwillingness to see their marriage as an equal partnership, and after a year she leaves him. After returning to the United States, Golden grapples with the painful realization that, while as a woman her options are much better in the US than in Nigeria, her son's status is far more precarious in her native country. In that context, she explores her decisions to send him away from the violence of Washington, D.C., to a boarding school outside Philadelphia, and to encourage his relationship with his Nigerian father, first through letters and early-morning international phone calls, and eventually through a visit to Africa. Occasionally, Golden descends to easy polemics about race in America, which overwhelms the specificity of her own narrative and her personal experiences of grief and fear. But for the most part, she admirably navigates between the intimate and the sociological. Though her prose is not always engaging or original, Golden brings an articulate and much-needed perspective to the current feminist discourse on raising sons and to the issue of the ``endangered'' black male.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47302-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
