A lyrically heartfelt memoir of resilience in the face of significant obstacles.
A young essayist’s memoir of her extraordinary riches-to-rags childhood in the Philippines.
Barnes was not yet 3 when her family moved into the Mansion Royale, “a stately home in a post-Spanish, post-American, and newly post-Marcos democracy.” Bought with her mother’s inherited wealth and her international businessman father’s hard-won gains, the house represented everything “glitter, gold, and glam.” But cracks soon began to appear in the family’s fairy-tale life. The author’s beautiful mother lost a baby and became subject to mood swings and violent fits of rage, and a “war between Uncle Sam and Saddam Hussein” in the Middle East caused her father’s business to founder. Desperate to shore up their finances, her parents used the last of their capital to transform the mansion into an events pavilion they rented out to film companies and wealthy families. Then an epic monsoon flooded the home and ruined it. Barnes’ father left the Philippines to rebuild his business while her increasingly unstable mother soon took up with a social climber named Norman, who beat her and used the mansion as a site for cockfighting and prostitution. Forced to fend for themselves, Barnes and her brother, Paolo, ran a student taxi to bring in food money only to have their mother force them to turn over the business to her lover. Meanwhile, Norman became involved with a guerrilla group in a failed attempt to build a political name for himself while the author’s mother continued to support him. Eventually rescued from the mansion by Paolo, Barnes went to live with a stepsister, and, at 12 years old, she finally found “mercy in the mundane” life that had eluded her. In this tender and eloquent tale, the author plumbs the depths of family dysfunction while telling a harrowing story of survival graced by moments of unexpected magic.
A lyrically heartfelt memoir of resilience in the face of significant obstacles.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4613-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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