Spirited and engaging, even for those who don't have a yen to undulate.
A vigorous, funny account of the effects of blighted romance cured, sort of, by a course in belly dancing.
Now an English teacher to troubled teens, newcomer Soffee recalls growing up in Richmond in a household dominated by her father's unpredictable but staunch Lebanese family. After a stint in California as a rock-star gofer (with all of the drugs and sex that implies) and alcoholism rehab, she slouched back home, her heart broken by a tattoo artist. After months of self-pity, over the protests of friends and family (“Your daddy ought to smack your face,” said great-aunt Frances), she enrolled in a belly-dancing class. Her rationale was to preserve her heritage, her real motive was never entirely clear, but she exulted in it. Part of the pleasure came from her new cohorts, mostly 30- to 40-year-olds with wide hips and convex bellies. (No pressure here to be supermodels.) Once into the world of belly dancing, Soffee describes her adventures in show biz: entertaining at nursing homes, at private parties (delivering “bellygrams”), at county fairs, and, memorably, at redneck bars. She shops for costumes, attends workshops and conventions, and waits breathlessly for the performance of a fabled Egyptian who dances with 12 lighted candles balanced on her head. Caught up in the ethnic wave, Soffee spends hours on the Internet tracking down potential Arab mates, only to discover that belly dancers are regarded not as guardians of an ancient tradition, but akin to strippers and prostitutes. Soffee gives a rousing defense of serious belly-dance students and performers, announcing a happy ending as she finds love with an gun-toting Aryan who honors her belly-dancing commitment by presenting her with a snag-proof engagement ring that wouldn't “get hung up on your veils.”
Spirited and engaging, even for those who don't have a yen to undulate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55652-458-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
