A penetrating analysis of the displacement and internal divisions created by linguistic adaptation, but undermined by a...
An often sophisticated, more frequently discursive memoir on transnational and translingual migration from Mexican-born critic and scholar Stavans (Latino U.S.A., 2000, etc.).
A product of the Jewish Diaspora (his grandmother emigrated from Poland in the early 1930s), Stavans grew up in the 1960s and ’70s amid a family that found artistic release in language. His father, one of the first Jewish actors in Mexico, became a soap-opera star. His brother Darian, a stutterer who experienced mental illness, overcame his difficulties enough to become a singer and musician. But Stavans’s Yiddish-speaking community, fearful of anti-Semitic outbreaks incited by the corrupt national regime, left him with a “feeling of marginality.” His restless utopian yearnings took him to Spain, Israel, and finally the US. Adding Spanish, Hebrew, and English to his linguistic skills provided him with a host of literary models to whom he pays eloquent tribute, including Kafka, Borges, Conrad, Nabokov, Richard Rodriguez, and especially Irving Howe. Most important, literature provided this self-described chameleon a means to forming his own identity and creating his own internal homeland. (Even his Whitmanesque ode to encountering New York for the first time evokes literature, as he compares the city to “a huge book, a novel-in-progress perhaps, filled with anecdotes, with a multilingual poetry impossible to repress.”) His meditations on the paradoxes of language are incisive (“Curiously, in the United States, to be a member of the upper class and a polyglot is a ticket to success. But multilingualism among the poor is unacceptable and, thus, immediately condemned”), and he uses his considerable erudition sparingly, always to illustrate points rather than merely to dazzle. Unfortunately, Stavans has not integrated the story of his family into the narrative enough to create a compelling story arc. Moreover, and perhaps more fatally for an intellectual memoir, his reflections are not focused or energized by either major figures he has known nor by an opposing ideology that can rouse him to combat.
A penetrating analysis of the displacement and internal divisions created by linguistic adaptation, but undermined by a rickety narrative structure.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-87763-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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