Observant but often jumbled and in dire need of editing.
A memoir that chronicles the misadventures of a Jamaican-born “drifter.”
After first-time author Philip was born in Jamaica, his father wrapped him up in his jacket, took him outside before the dawn, and held him up to the heavens, praying that he would survive because his mother had lost at least five other babies. Philip has led an eventful life ever since, which he chronicles in his sometimes-entertaining, sometimes-bewildering memoir, styling himself as a “drifter” on a “spiritual journey.” “In this story I have put together a portfolio of my life experiences...to show how the drifter triumph [sic] over evil for good, with the hope that others may learn something from his experiences,” he writes. Philip’s meandering took him to England, back to Jamaica, to the Congo, and then back to England, spanning at least two marriages, extensive marijuana use, a spell as a musician, and even an arrest for rape that landed him in a Jamaican jail cell for six months. He was never convicted. In the “land of my birth my own people locked me up in a room full of human shits,” he laments. Some readers may find this tale to be, at the very least, self-indulgent, the stream of consciousness of a “ganja”-addled misfit who is incapable of maintaining a relationship with another human being. The book is also rife with malapropisms—for example, “she was showing me the autonomy of the woman’s body parts.” But Philip is cleareyed about the poverty of his homeland and the racism he encountered as a schoolboy in England, recalling that one teacher “felt like giving all of us blacks and Pakistani to cane but he is going to wait until the lesson is over.” And there is a picaresque flavor to the book—his life as a musician was “just sex Drugs and Rack an Roll and free food sometimes”—as Philip drifts from one misadventure to another.
Observant but often jumbled and in dire need of editing.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-9538-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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