Massaquoi, of mixed African-German parentage, came of age in Nazi Germany; he depicts the trauma of his childhood, and his improbable survival of it, in a nuanced, startling memoir. As a small boy, Massaquoi was “fascinated and moved” by Hitler and seduced by Nazi busywork and organized pageantry. Thus he felt exceptionally betrayed upon realizing that there was no place for a “non-Aryan” such as himself in the Reich. Although his devoted mutti protected him fiercely (his father had returned to Liberia), he encountered virulent abuse at school and was dehumanized by the Nuremburg Laws, which essentially barred him from public life, whether from a playground or from the Hitlerjugend, which all his chums joined. Things became much worse during the war years, when, perversely, he repeatedly escaped the worst fate by a hairbreadth. This included nearly being discovered “race mixing” by the SS and surviving the protracted fire bombing that leveled his beloved Hamburg. Massaquoi’s unique, pathos-filled childhood in extremis is rendered superlatively, as is his portrait of a prewar Germany giddily embarked on its own destruction; he keenly perceives both the nefarious ambiguity and the human tragedy inherent in this civic embrace of evil. Also, his depiction of postwar anguish, and his own emergence as a hipster black-marketer befriended by cynical, reefer-smoking black GIs among whom he was thrilled to “pass,” is highly engaging. Less so, however, are the instances when his narrative turns ’soft” or vaguely contemplative; the interesting tale of his eventual repatriation to Liberia to meet his volatile, powerful father is necessarily less profound than earlier chapters. Massaquoi later immigrated to the US; a journalist, he was managing editor of Ebony magazine. Although the bizarre singularity of the child Massaquoi’s plight is central to the work, it is the journalist Massaquoi’s close eye for the subtleties of personal and social behavior, as well as a rather daring digressive structural and prose style, that makes this unusual tale both substantiative and memorable.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-17155-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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