Sometimes hair is just hair, though the dreadlocked professor rarely leaves it at that.
Much ado about dreadlocks.
Ashe (English and American Studies/Univ. of Richmond) sustains an engaging tone as he obsesses on his decision to grow dreads, the significance and implications. His adoption of the style seems to coincide with the cultural shift in dreads away from a feared symbol of rebellion. “Dreads have, alas, become a cliché,” he writes, and then later elaborates, “I’m to blame. It’s all on me. If only I hadn’t attempted to use dreadlocks to explore the hyphenated space between un- and conventional, I have to believe dreads would still be the cutting edge hairstyle it once was.” As an academic who developed a course titled “Hair, Hoops and Jazz: Explorations in African-American Expressive Culture,” Ashe refuses to be stifled by typical academic strictures, and his attitude throughout seems playfully serious (or seriously playful), as he details more about dreads—their origin, their rise to popularity, their co-option, their care and upkeep—than most readers will think they would want to know. He confesses that he was never much of a reggae fan as he obsessively explores why he was nonetheless drawn to dreads and why it took him so long (years, decades) to act on that impulse. Even after he becomes dreadlocked, he seems far more interested in the reactions his hair elicits from others than in whatever it says about him. He’s very funny on what he calls the “B.H.P.D.—the Black Hair Police Department,” but most of the responses seemed to be that the dreads made the professor look even more professorial. “I’ve always admired nonconformists,” he writes. “Admired them from a distance. In my early years, I was not only a conformist, I was a hyper-conformist. Conformity, after all, is just a form of willing invisibility, a way to blend in, to exist and yet remain unseen.”
Sometimes hair is just hair, though the dreadlocked professor rarely leaves it at that.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-932841-96-1
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Agate
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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