A memorable portrait, more painful than refined, of life among the poor in present-day India.
Memoirs of a young Indian woman who writes matter-of-factly of a life of neglect, abuse, poverty, hardship and hard work.
Halder, a domestic worker near Delhi, began to chronicle her life story when her employer, retired academic Prabodh Kumar, gave her a pen and notebook and told her to start. He translated her memoirs from her native Bengali into Hindi, edited them and arranged for their publication in India. The present translation into English leaves much to be desired. Too many words—“mela,” “panchayat,” “paan,” aanchal,” “charpai”—are left untranslated, and terms that designate relationships rather than personal names are capitalized, making the reader’s grasp of the large cast of characters unnecessarily difficult. Halder’s story is a bleak one: Her mother abandoned the family when she was four; her father married her off to an illiterate, abusive man nearly twice her age when she was not yet 13; and she bore her first child before she was 14. Halder lived in constant fear of her husband’s beatings and frequently fled to the home of relatives, where she was sometimes welcomed, sometimes not. She learned that her older sister had been strangled by her husband, and once her own husband split open her head after seeing her speak to a man. At age 29, she fled with her three children to the city. She eventually landed in the household of Prabodh Kumar, who was kind to her and her children. Halder tells of years of suffering in the first person, but occasionally shifts into the third, perhaps because a particular memory is too emotionally charged. The stoicism with which she accepts her lot in the early years gradually changes as she matures.
A memorable portrait, more painful than refined, of life among the poor in present-day India.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-125581-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HC/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
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Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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