Too scholarly for some readers, but Stavans provides a relevant, fresh point of view.
Born in Mexico City and educated in a Yiddish-language school, Stavans (Latin American and Latino Culture/Amherst Coll.; Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years, 2010, etc.) collects some of his journalistic output as a deeply engaged cultural observer.
Calling himself an “accidental Mexican,” and rather more Jewish than Mexican, he moved to New York in 1985. In the life and work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who immigrated to New York from Poland in 1935, Stavans found a kindred spirit. From anonymous immigrant, switching languages and cultures and moving from poverty to recognition and financial stability with the help of his antiquated, trusty Hebrew-character Underwood typewriter purchased in Coney Island, Singer personifies the American dream. Stavans’ own devotion to Yiddish burbles in other essays here, such as a revisiting of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. Stavans writes about the particularly delightful hurdles of translating Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye der milkhiker; offers some prescient re-readings of Argentine Jacobo Timerman, poet Homero Aridjis and critic Lionel Trilling; and includes an interview of novelist Allegra Goodman and an interview of himself regarding the translation of the King James Bible. Among the most elucidating essays concern Singer’s sister, Esther Kreitman, “the other Singer,” relegated to obscurity despite her own impressive literary output and due for correction and rehabilitation along with numerous other female masters of Yiddish. In “What Melting Pot?” Stavans delivers a moving, detailed take on the profound changes the author has observed in Jewish American identity through language and literature.
Too scholarly for some readers, but Stavans provides a relevant, fresh point of view.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7136-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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