A confident, witty tale of triumph and sacrifice.
A bold, inspiring debut memoir by the first female ironworker in the state of New Mexico.
Padilla is the second of nine children raised in a “humble two-bedroom home” by hardworking parents without high school diplomas. She recalls the Spanish culture in her upbringing: “women usually learned at an early age that one important role in their lives was the care of family, especially the men.” Independent, ambitious and determined, Padilla had no intention of letting her gender dictate her career. At 26, despite opposition from men and women alike, she became an apprentice under Ironworkers Local 495. Her desire “to learn a skill and have a title with responsibilities” propelled her through the difficulties of her first post as “one female among twenty-five-hundred [men] at the power plant.” A talented ironworker, Padilla developed an excellent reputation and the respect of most of her colleagues. Though her personal life isn’t at the forefront of her story, she describes her unsuccessful first marriage and her wonderful second one. She’s also generous with praise for peers as well as herself—a tendency that occasionally weakens the narrative. It’s clear that her colleagues’ admiration of her is well-earned, but there are times when the repeated references to this err on the side of boasting: “I worked hard and did a good job, making it look easy.” Nonetheless, her awe for the craft is unwavering: “[I]ronworkers are artists—make no mistake about that.” The descriptions of workplace conflict grow tedious—“I had again to prove that I was up to the task”—perhaps since Padilla repeatedly faces the same obstacles. She sustains two significant injuries during her career, the second of which occurs during a negative experience in which she faces “cliques…just as in high school,” forcing her to stop “work[ing] in iron.” Although the final pages show an ugly underside of the “brotherhood,” the overall tone is one of good cheer. “I knew I would face many firsts,” Padilla writes. “I just hoped I lived to talk about them.”
A confident, witty tale of triumph and sacrifice.Pub Date: April 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468566949
Page Count: 236
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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