This book represents the beginning—or a necessary reset—of an essential dialogue.
A “lost boy” of Sudan and a California housewife forge a bond in this compelling dual memoir.
Deng and Bernstein (co-authors: They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan, 2005) met in San Diego just a few weeks before 9/11, brought together by the International Rescue Committee. They each experienced a process of acclimatization: Deng wrestled with what it meant to live in America, while Bernstein struggled with assumptions of her own. The book is written as a back-and-forth text, interspersing chapters in both voices to create a sense of conversation. It’s an effective strategy that helps readers understand on a visceral level the gap between these two very different sensibilities and the accommodations required on every side. Bernstein, for her part, can be funny; early in the book, she describes a humorous scene in which her son, Cliff, introduced Deng and two fellow refugees to the soda machine at a fast food restaurant. It’s a small moment, but it highlights a major issue: the difficulty of adapting, or moving, between two vastly different worlds. For Deng and his fellow refugees, America was the land of opportunity. “The poorest man in America is like the richest in Africa,” he was told. Beset by parasites, trying to adjust to working in a supermarket, he was confounded at nearly every turn. For Bernstein, the challenges were different: to see and interact with Deng, on his own terms. “They needed an advocate,” she writes. “A huge learning curve lay ahead for all of us.” The narrative traces the arc of that collective shift. Although it occasionally gets bogged down in the detritus of daily life, it is an important reminder of all we share as human beings. “Being a refugee,” Deng writes, “can feel like an invasion of another nation’s economy, resources, culture and space….I understand those feelings because as a refugee I am a person whose own way of life was violated in my native land.”
This book represents the beginning—or a necessary reset—of an essential dialogue.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982546-22-9
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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