A timely and often insightful perspective on modern-day Haiti woven into an overlong and banal family saga.
A missionary’s daughter recounts her childhood experiences in Haiti.
Debut author Irving, a past contributor to This American Life, was 6 years old when her family first moved from Oregon to Haiti in the early 1980s. Together with her parents and two younger sisters, they spent much of the next decade striving to improve the living conditions of a region experiencing unrelenting social upheaval and drought. The family was led by the fierce determination of their agronomist father. “My father’s vision for utopia,” writes the author, “was agrarian: trees on every hillside, vegetables in every garden, water in every dry streambed. Seeds were small, but they could change the world.” As the narrative progresses, the focal point becomes the author’s conflicting relationship with her father and how it related to his idealistic vision for the country and his family. Irving draws from their various journals, each offering a distinct slant on her experiences of that time and place. She reveals how her parents’ moral and religious zeal intersected and at times clashed with the harsh realities they faced each day in an uncompromising setting. “If, like my father, you suffer from a savior complex,” writes the author, “Haiti is a bleak assignment, but if you are able to enter it unguarded, shielded only by curiosity, you will find the sorrows entangled with a defiant joy.” In the lengthy final section, Irving tracks some of the changes in the region from her vantage point as a young woman returning after a 10-year absence. Later, she would assess further hardships in the capacity of a journalist assigned to cover the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake. Throughout the book, Irving reveals a journalist’s seasoned eye for nuanced regional detail, but her personal journey is surprisingly uninvolving and frequently bogged down by self-consciousness. A tighter edit, including a significant page-count reduction, may have resulted in a more authentically compelling story.
A timely and often insightful perspective on modern-day Haiti woven into an overlong and banal family saga.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9045-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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