The prolific, resilient Maya Angelou continues her autobiography in this sunny tour of her twenties, covering her first positive contact with whites, a short-lived marriage to a Greek sailor, and the snowballing of her theatrical career. Tosh Angelos knew black jazz and showed concern for her son Clyde but that wasn't enough: they! separated after about two years—he'd lost his liberty, she'd surrendered her independence. She changed her name but not her spirit, started dancing in a strip joint ("Be real sexy. And don't leave your purse in the dressing room"), soon landed a job at the prestigious Purple Onion. Then a major choice: a Saint Subber play on Broadway (with Capote in the wings) or a Porgy and Bess tour of Europe. She chose Porgy and cavorted through the continent and North Africa in a grand company. Steeled by her mother's cautious advice but missing her young son, she took it all in and relives it here with enthusiasm, poetry and wit. She felt an emotional bond to servants in Egypt, intellectual ties to Israel; always there were strangers who surprised her with their sudden attachment: a Slavic family volunteered Robeson's "Deep River," Mr. Julian sent his heart and promised more, a ship captain warned her off champagne before a coming storm. Her long absence was not without its consequences: Clyde had his troubles at home, and Maya returned to answer for her neglect. Nevertheless her trip seems an enchantment, a sign of her sense of adventure and many, many talents. Like found money, she makes you feel richer for the discovery.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1976
ISBN: 081298031X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1976
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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