Undeniable horror, unremarkable writing.
A novelist (Dreams of the Kalahari, 1981, not reviewed) recalls the difficulties of her African girlhood, including a series of brutal rapes by her father, beginning when she was six.
Slaughter offers a stark account of her life in Africa with a dour, brutal father and manic mother. Her father, a British foreign-service officer who was around for the fall of the Raj in India, moves thereafter to Africa, where he accepts one dreary posting after another at the time that many countries on the continent were emerging from generations of colonial control. Slaughter begins with her early childhood on the journey from England to Africa and ends with her return a dozen or so years later. In between, she documents all sorts of unpleasantness(from having to drink her own urine (a punishment for wetting herself at school), to seeing her father’s testicles dangle outside his shorts, to hearing of children eaten by crocodiles, to plotting (and very nearly executing) the murder of her father. “I should have known that he’d be unkillable,” she sighs. She eventually goes off to boarding school, where she shocks the nuns with her intransigence and ignorance, falls in love with a fellow student named Virginia (they become fast friends and do not, Slaughter declares, become physically intimate), and eventually(with the older Virginia as her mentor(begins to gain some control of her life. What Slaughter does not take control of here is her language. At even the most poignant moments, she cannot resist the fatal allure of cliché (people go ballistic, have steady streams of conversation, and wash their hands of each other) and at other times she cannot manage more than the banal: “Only in poetry,” she writes, “could I find a mirror for the innermost life of the mind.” She asserts that she did not remember the rapes until ten years ago, when shards of memories began to slice at her.
Undeniable horror, unremarkable writing.Pub Date: May 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41397-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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