Despite the subtitle, those looking for an uplifting tale of redemption will not find much succor in this honest account,...
Brief, harrowing chronicle of the author’s time soldiering for the Bloods.
The book opens with a frenetic, imploring introduction by T. Rodgers, a West Coast O.G. so old-school he doesn’t even signify Blood or Crip, aligning instead with their precursors. Immediately following, Morris’s unusually affecting stream-of-consciousness prologue tosses readers right into the blood-spattered nightmare that was his traumatized life. Sent by his mother from New Jersey to Phoenix to live with strict Muslim relatives at a young age, Morris fell in with the gangbangers who thrived in his new neighborhood: “Out here on my own, I’m not safe. I don’t have much choice; I’m surrounded by gangs and all my friends are down with them.” The Bloods Morris ran with clearly relished the chance to play with their newest member, initiating him by driving to a Crip-run block and having him open fire on some rivals, then celebrating with weed and beer. He was ten years old. A move back to his mother’s house on the East Coast didn’t help much. By the time he was in high school Morris was a bona fide street soldier, warring not just with Crips but any clique or gang suspected of being a rival to his crew. He developed a schizoid split as he began to excel at football, eventually becoming team captain at the same time that he was running the streets. By the time a college scholarship and the possibility of an NFL future came his way, however, it seemed there was little that could disrupt the violent nightmare he was trapped in. Morris wasn’t remorseful when he finally went to jail (a surprisingly lenient six-month term), but that was where he decided to “choose a better LIFE.”
Despite the subtitle, those looking for an uplifting tale of redemption will not find much succor in this honest account, which doesn’t romanticize either gang life or its law-abiding alternative.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4846-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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