A low-key, sweet portrait of an unusual friendship. Jenniemae is a scene-stealer, though, and the strongest parts of the...
A grown daughter remembers her troubled, genius father’s endearing friendship with their charismatic maid.
James Newman was a mathematical genius with an almost incomprehensible mind. He entered college at age 14, finished law school before 21, coined the term “googol” and authored the seminal text, The World of Mathematics (1956). Personally, though, he was troubled, emotionally distant and addicted to infidelity—he married three times before he turned 24, each relationship ending because of his affairs. In this quiet memoir, his daughter, Brooke Newman (The Little Tern, 2002), remembers an endearing side to her father—his odd, lovely friendship with their maid. Jenniemae was black, illiterate, immensely overweight, fervently religious and desperately poor. Given the circumstances, it was particularly unusual in the 1940s and ’50s for her to strike up a friendship with her white male employer. They bonded initially over numbers, though their experiences with them were quite different. Jenniemae gambled her hard-earned money every morning on numbers that came to her in religious dreams and was popular in her community for having good luck. Logical James was fascinated with her system, but Jenniemae would never share her secrets with him. Soon James was doing things for her that made the rest of the family skeptical, such as installing a separate phone line for Jenniemae in the maid’s quarters for her private use. Jenniemae was the one constant in the Newman family, running an incredibly efficient household and essentially raising the author and her brother in the face of feuding, often absent parents. As James descended further into the world of abstract mathematics, Jenniemae strangely became a constant to him as well, and it is their relationship that comprises Newman’s fondest memories of her father.
A low-key, sweet portrait of an unusual friendship. Jenniemae is a scene-stealer, though, and the strongest parts of the memoir focus on her and her community.Pub Date: March 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46299-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
