The reader is left with unanswered questions, and the author remains a stranger.
A young black woman’s search for identity takes her from a blue-collar Latino neighborhood in San Jose, Calif., to Silicon Valley, Harvard and beyond.
Debut memoirist Millner describes her childhood as a “mélange of cheerful American pragmatism and Latin baroque and African-American skepticism.” In each of these worlds, she remained the observant outsider. When she was a teenager, her parents, who placed a high value on education, moved the family to Almaden Valley, where she attended a nearly all-white, all-girls Catholic high school. Her struggles with racism at the school led to her first published piece, an article in the San Jose Mercury News that brought uncomfortable notoriety to the overachieving teenager. During this time, Millner was using marijuana, mushrooms, acid and alcohol; cocaine and amphetamines would follow. Fortunately, she found a better way of dealing with her anger and despair by writing for Youth Outlook, a nonprofit organization that gives disadvantaged teens a chance to report and write for the mainstream media. After high school, Millner enrolled at Harvard. The university had a substantial African-American community, but she soon became disenchanted by the disconnect between the other black students’ words and their actions. During a later stay in South Africa, she had a disastrous love affair with an Englishman, a frustrating venture into political activism in a Cape Town neighborhood and a troubling visit to a settlement created exclusively for descendants of white settlers. Millner writes rather obliquely about her experiences and her occasionally bruising encounters with aspects of American culture: Concrete details take second place to feelings, and influential figures in her life are described in carefully crafted first-person essays.
The reader is left with unanswered questions, and the author remains a stranger.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2007
ISBN: 1-59420-109-9
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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