A timely investigation that turns up “sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing...
A cultural commentator turns her acute observational skills and journalistic skills to the mystery of her own heritage.
When Wagner, currently an anchor and contributor for CBS News and a contributing editor at the Atlantic, started pulling the threads of history between her Burmese mother and her American father, it didn’t take long for the perceptive journalist to see that things could get messy. Her thinking about American identity harkens back to a 1993 Time cover story that heralded a multicultural woman as “The New Face of America,” which explained “how immigrants are shaping the world’s first multicultural society”—hence her concept of “Futureface.” The narrative is part Mary Roach–style, participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. “I wanted definitive proof that I was not alone, that I belonged….It was a mystery to be solved—several mysteries, to be honest—and, oh, did I love mysteries,” writes Wagner. “I was on the case: telephone, magnifying glass, library card, passport in hand.” After introducing her family’s complex genealogy, including a hint of Jewish ancestry, Wagner recounts her trip to Burma, where she discovered the same distressing cultural fracturing she has been reporting on in America. Without discovering any documents of substance there, she headed home to go through the complex history of Henry Wagner, her great-grandfather, who brought his family from Luxembourg to Iowa. Wagner picks apart the “White Immigrant Origin Story,” digs through digital and physical records, and subjects herself and her family to scores of DNA tests, the results of which proved “less than convincing.” Regardless of whether Wagner solved her mystery, the journey is worth taking; it serves as a welcome reminder that tribalism and xenophobia are dangerous but ultimately futile threats. As the author writes, the search for ancestry is “a reminder that ultimately, we are all in this together—still.”
A timely investigation that turns up “sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing everyone, even the people doing the expelling.”Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9794-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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