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BORN BRIGHT

A YOUNG GIRL'S JOURNEY FROM NOTHING TO SOMETHING IN AMERICA

A thoughtful, well-crafted rejoinder to Claude Brown’s half-century-old Manchild in the Promised Land, speaking to the power...

The aspirational story of a young African-American woman’s rise from poverty.

“I considered myself fortunate, but in no way exceptional.” So, toward the end of her memoir, writes Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest executive director Mason of finding herself safely in academia and away from the fraught streets of the inner city. Getting there, she remarks, was a “herculean” matter of working past a host of obstacles—including, she suggests, the whole welfare establishment—that have been set up as if to make sure that children like her do not leave the ghetto for better lives. She levels the charge with such reasonableness that it seems unobjectionable, but of course, her memoir reveals her to be exceptional indeed. Even so, being exceptional, it seems, is not enough: in our Horatio Alger–like conception of wealth and poverty, we imagine that hard work, ambition, and perseverance will see us through and that poor people are that way by choice. Mason puts the lie to such notions, though she also provides ammunition for those who condemn generational welfare with her portrait of her mother, adept at working the system while making money on the side in the drug trade. (At the same time, her mother emerges as a good citizen of a kind, taking care of those even less fortunate.) A key for escape from poverty, by Mason’s account, is education. More than that, there is the kind of social encouragement that her white peers seem to enjoy, with their “different way of being in the world, entitled and less fearful.” Though without that cloying sense of entitlement, Mason’s memoir also proves the power of assertive networking, for once she figured out that others were in positions to help her, she wasn’t shy of asking.

A thoughtful, well-crafted rejoinder to Claude Brown’s half-century-old Manchild in the Promised Land, speaking to the power of hope and the institutional changes needed to make hope possible.

Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-250-06992-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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