When Butler maintains his focus on Cuba, vivid passages and provocative experiences illuminate an island of ambiguity.
Though categorized as a memoir, the most compelling parts of this disjointed narrative concern the Cuba that the author has explored trying to come to terms with a story.
Butler (A Cuban Boxer's Journey: Guillermo Rigondeaux, from Castro's Traitor to American Champion, 2014) delivers colorful writing and insightful analysis, but a slight shift in perspective would have resulted in a better book about the author’s subject: Cuba and why some athletes choose to defect and others remain. Plainly an author with literary ambitions beyond journalism, Butler writes of the essence of boxing and his discovery of it, of his alcoholic father, and of the sense of mission that compelled him to visit Cuba, return multiple times, and put himself in political peril there. He is oddly reticent for a memoirist on other parts of his life, including his marriage, mentioned only as an afterthought as he details his relationship with a beautiful woman of Cuban descent. Butler invokes many literary antecedents, not only the obligatory Hemingway, but also Kundera, Calvino, and Strindberg. Rather than enhancing his portrait of Cuba, its ineffable beauty and sorrow, its athletes who face a dilemma in which there is collateral damage to friends and family, its women who are as available as they are irresistible, his excursions away from his focus on the island only serve to distract. “What’s a million dollars to the love of eight million Cubans?” the author quotes Olympic boxing champ Teófilo Stevenson, the Muhammad Ali of Cuba, who spurned more than that to fight his American counterpart (but who only consented to an interview with the author for money). Yet for the woman who would become his mistress, “Cuba was a bear trap where the only means of escape required amputating vital portions of her soul.” The book is by no means a political polemic but a nuanced portrait of the grays where reality lies between the black and white.
When Butler maintains his focus on Cuba, vivid passages and provocative experiences illuminate an island of ambiguity.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04370-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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