Occasionally uneven, but an impassioned and honest memoir from an author determined to prove himself worthy.
This story of the personal struggle of an undocumented alien underscores the need for comprehensive immigration reform.
Being without papeles all his life growing up in New York City led Peralta to hide his impoverished Dominican roots—until Ivy League sponsors and even President Bill Clinton helped get him permission to travel abroad to Oxford and eventually change his immigrant status to allow him to attend graduate school at Stanford. For any other undocumented person, deportation loomed, while leaving the country meant being barred from re-entry, a fact the author is cognizant of as he embraces his great opportunity in America. Peralta’s parents first brought him to America when he was 4, in 1989. Though they had solid office jobs in Santo Domingo, the parents sought better health care and schools but soon came up against the enormous cost of living in New York, where some of the family’s aunts and uncles already lived. Peralta’s father moved back, but his mother stayed, fiercely keeping the family going even when they had to live in a homeless shelter for a year. Still, the author was an avid reader, and he excelled in the New York public schools, catching the attention of an art teacher who became the boy’s “big brother” and helped navigate Peralta’s admission to an elite Upper West Side private school, Collegiate, where he mixed with mostly rich white kids and never let on to his true undocumented status. At this point in the narrative, the author slips into a street slang that he assumed with irony—a way of “fronting” to show how tough he had to be straddling two different worlds. Yet it’s jarring, as he keeps it up through the narrative of his college years at Princeton and beyond. The author eventually became a scholar of classics, and the “whispering ghost of race/survivor guilt” still haunts.
Occasionally uneven, but an impassioned and honest memoir from an author determined to prove himself worthy.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59420-652-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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