The memoirs of an Armenian-American as she struggles for self- awareness. Avakian, whose mother and grandmother came to the US after surviving the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, grew up in New York and New Jersey in the 40's and 50's, lived as a professor's wife in the 60's, and entered the feminist movement—- recognizing her own identity as a lesbian—-in the 70's. Avakian's story begins with her struggle to ``become an American.'' All but denying her Armenian heritage, she attends a ``regular'' church, makes Jewish and Greek friends, and avoids her family's demands whenever possible. She studies art history at Alfred Univ. and then Columbia, marries a young academic and travels with him from one teaching appointment to another while raising their two young children. Avakian is at her best when describing her married years: The confusion and oppression she felt then are palpable. After becoming pregnant with her first child, she says, ``I spent most of the time sitting in the apartment and staring at the walls....I just sat and waited for the baby that had already changed my life.'' Her observations of university life and her accounts of friendships are also vivid and engrossing. But her chronicle bogs down with too-long descriptions of courses and university bickering. Avakian also does little to explore her Armenian heritage, and when she does return to the subject in the last chapter—by interviewing her relatives—the effort seems merely tacked on. Despite the Armenian-American twist, this is primarily the story of an academic wife breaking out of the mold to re-create herself. As such, it's well written and acutely observant, though slow in parts.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55861-051-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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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