A powerfully written, heartbreaking account of making sure that all children have the opportunity to “dream big dreams and...
A story of UNICEF from the front lines.
Stern, the president and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, recounts how she started her branch of UNICEF and was then tapped to take over the top job and almost immediately dispatched to Mozambique, where she was introduced “to the effects of severe poverty on mothers and children.” Between 2007 and 2011, she visited Mozambique, Darfur, Sierra Leone, Haiti and Kenya. She writes about the problems of expressing to people the very real pain and suffering she has discovered in these poor countries. Admirably, she personalizes and individualizes what are often presented as general problems—a woman in Mozambique, whose fourth child was her first to survive, in an earthen-floored birthing unit located a four-hour walk from her place of work. So shocking are the situations she encounters that she finds herself continually making comparisons with her own family’s Holocaust past. In Darfur, she was struck by not only the images of malnourished children, but also the “ghostlike eyes” of the women who had been through hell telling their stories of their own rapes, as well as those of their children. Equally brutal was her encounter with the maternal neonatal tetanus virus and her presence at the death of a 6-day-old infant convulsing in pain, as well as the impotence of those who knew the disease could be treated but could not stop it. “I used to regard heroes as people who had done unique, unimaginable things: saving a child’s life or standing up to a bully,” she writes. “After visiting Haiti, I decided that sometimes my heroes were people whose whole lives had been destroyed but who day after day took a breath and resolved to carry on, have faith, and pursue their dreams anew.”
A powerfully written, heartbreaking account of making sure that all children have the opportunity to “dream big dreams and have a fighting chance to realize those dreams.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02624-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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