A confidently told but not wholly inspiring memoir.
A young Latino man recounts his coming-of-age amid the usual foibles inherent in growing up.
In his debut memoir, writer/actor Gómez brings his one-man show to the page, exploring issues of fear, forgiveness, sexuality and what it means to be a man. A self-described “middle-class, racist, light-skinned Latino,” the author often employs race as a lens through which to view his world. After an early childhood spent overseas, Gómez returned to a race-conscious America and became increasingly aware of issues regarding race. “During basketball games, at first I would be treated like everyone else, but when the referee heard someone call me Carlos, he would make tighter calls on me,” he writes. Gómez’s complaints are hardly limited to the basketball court, but soon included the failures of various schools, none of which seemed to give Gómez the support he required. The book becomes far more engaging when the author considers his own role in his life’s choices, reflecting on the hard questions. He concludes that while he was occasionally a victim of the world’s biases, oftentimes he played the part of the perpetrator as well, particularly in regard to his relationships with women. Gómez’s straight-talk approach to his philandering (as well as his obvious regret) becomes the highlight of the book, a strand of narrative that seems to absolve him of past trespasses. A greater trespass, however, is Gómez’s seemingly conscious choice to awkwardly assemble his life story to fit a storyline—a trick he often employed to impress women. “I am a pimp,” Gómez admits, speaking of his past relationships, “one who conveniently coopted this narrative throughout his life, on frequent occasion, and exploited the act of honesty to get what he wanted.” His mea culpa, while appreciated, does little to excuse the memoir its more indulgent and didactic moments.
A confidently told but not wholly inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-592-40778-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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