Gracious and generous, this personal account of a remarkable life is a reminder of how peace comes in small increments as...
A refugee’s memoir about hope, fear, luck, and the devotion of people to causes larger than themselves.
Al Samawi grew up in a traditional, highly devoted Muslim family in Sana’a, Yemen. Because of a childhood illness, he was partially paralyzed on one side of his body. He focused all his attention on his studies and on being a dutiful son, and he grew up not questioning what he had been taught about the dangers and evils of Jews and Westerners. The first half of this compelling memoir tells of the author’s life growing up in a tumultuous political and social environment. In the second half of the book, which is what makes it so powerful, Al Samawi chronicles how he became a peace activist, hiding his desire to know and understand Jews, Christians, and others committed to peace and reconciliation. At the epicenter of this story is his escape from the civil war in Yemen in 2015. He was trapped in his apartment and relied on a network of fellow peace activists, many of them Jews and Westerners spread across the globe, who helped him make his way through a nightmare of violence, bureaucratic indifference, and international chaos, not to mention numerous death threats. Had he been caught, he likely would have been identified as an active campaigner for human rights with deep and growing connections to peace movements and suspect alliances, all of which would have surely led to his death. The author is exceptionally earnest—perhaps too much so for some readers—with a tendency to reproduce lengthy conversations from years ago. Nonetheless, he is an effective, engaging narrator with an important story to tell.
Gracious and generous, this personal account of a remarkable life is a reminder of how peace comes in small increments as the result of the work of committed individuals.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267819-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2018
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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