A sequel to this author’s extraordinary debut is hopefully in the works. One senses she has much more to say.
First-time author Buhler’s charming childhood memoir about growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation in the early 1960s.
Although the dusty, red landscape of Navajo country has changed little in the past four decades, its people are measurably different today. Even so, not much has been written about the Navajo shifts from traditional culture to modernism during the ’60s, making Buhler’s take an entry-level immersion into one of the most important decades in Navajo history. That the story is captured in real time through the eyes of a young girl is far less important than what those eyes see: newly paved roads, new clinics being built and a turbulent clash of cultures. Coming from a small Texas town and a family tree of racial discrimination, young Buhler’s parents pack her and her siblings up and move to Shiprock, where her father takes a job as gym teacher. Situated across the street from the Navajo boarding school in a segregated housing complex, after months of adjustment, the white family adopts two Navajo boys and slowly absorbs into the culture. On the occasional family reunion back to Texas, Buhler is asked to remove her concho belt and moccasins (traditional Navajo wear), as not to offend her relatives. The stage is set, and the reader delves into the stark contrast between the old generation of white racial intolerance and the new generation thrown into embracing misunderstood cultures. Later, when Buhler’s family leaves the reservation permanently, the road is studded with tension and even tragedy as the world at large shuns her Navajo brothers. Since this narrative is captured through the point of view of a little girl, the story drifts along with day-to-day details and simple language. Yet on turns the book sparkles with revealing moments of poignant insight, such as when the narrator observes the Navajo children entering the boarding school with long hair, only to leave with shaved heads. Or when a Navajo woman points with her lips at another person and not with her finger because the latter is taboo. The epilogue is the most elaborative chapter as the story ends in the racially motivated murder of her adopted brother and Buhler’s self-reconciliation through the Navajo worldview.
A sequel to this author’s extraordinary debut is hopefully in the works. One senses she has much more to say.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-40543-5
Page Count: 170
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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