Inspiring, insightful, and thoroughly readable.
A distinguished public radio producer’s collection of conversations with Americans who “found…their way to doing exactly what they were meant to do with their lives.”
StoryCorps founder Isay (Ties that Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps, 2013, etc.) discovered his calling as a radio broadcaster at age 22, just as he was about to begin medical school. In this book, he presents his conversations with people—ages 10 to 90 from different backgrounds and geographical locations in the United States—who discuss what makes work meaningful for them. The author culled these stories from thousands of interviews recorded over more than a decade, but many have neither been published nor broadcast until now. The first section, titled “Dreamers,” features discussions with people engaged in unusual occupations, such as street corner astronomer or bridge-tender, or in more conventional ones like doctor or astronaut that have required great personal sacrifice and commitment. In the second section, “Generations,” people talk about their work in a historical context. A father and son, for example, discuss their work as firefighters and the pride they take in being part of a family tradition of saving lives, while a New York–based sculptor tells her ex-husband about the artist mother who became her “greatest muse.” In the third section, “Healers,” Isay interviews people like an oncology nurse and a public defender, who help restore everything from broken bodies to damaged social systems. The fourth section, “Philosophers,” features stories from individuals—such as the accountant-turned–lox-slicer whose work brought him unexpected Zen-like peace—who have developed especially unique perspectives on life through the work they do. In the final section, “Groundbreakers,” the author provides stories about unsung professional pioneers. Two children of video game inventor Jerry Lawson, for example, discuss their father’s passion for experimenting even as diabetes came to rule, then claim, his life. Thoughtfully organized and edited, each story is a reminder of the essential role work plays in the pursuit of human happiness.
Inspiring, insightful, and thoroughly readable.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-518-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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