A book of hope for lives that need turning around.
The story of how discovering the secret of her birth transformed Stein’s life.
In the opening chapter, the author recalls how, as a 12-year-old girl of mixed, uncertain race adopted into an academic family and a life of the arts, she found a letter that devastated her. Her adoptive mother had long ago made a request that the author’s birth certificate be altered so that she would never learn that she had been born in prison to a heroin-addicted mother. It also seems that, as a baby, she had passed through a series of foster homes, none of which she remembers. “I tuck the paper back into the liner and float from the dresser into my parents’ bedroom and stare at myself in the mirror over the sink, my body in overload” writes Stein. “Time and space distort inside me, I don’t know where I am.” Perhaps the revelation comes too early in the narrative, before readers have gotten a chance to get to know the writer, but such overwriting (and overdramatizing) initially seems to undermine a story that is powerful enough on its own. Through the first half of the memoir, it remains difficult to get to know Stein due to the fact that she doesn’t really know herself. She plainly had some behavioral issues before the revelation—a deep resentment toward her adoptive parents, a penchant for acting out and a hyperactive mind that would likely be diagnosed as ADD—but she spiraled downward into addiction, crime, and unsatisfying sex with both men and women before she turned her life around. The redemptive second half of the memoir explains much of the first, as she learns what heroin in utero can cause, follows a paper trail back to her prison origin, comes to terms with both her birth mother and her adoptive family, and devotes her life to helping and raising consciousness about women in prison.
A book of hope for lives that need turning around.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9810-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
A grown man reads through a diary of his father’s travels in China and Tibet, written long ago and kept locked away for many years in a red box. S°s grew up in Prague in the 1950s, where his father Vladimir worked as a filmmaker. Ordered by the Communist authorities to make a documentary of a road construction in China, Vladimir becomes separated from his film crew and lost in Tibet. His diary describes his wanderings in that strange and magical place: to find his way home, Vladimir hikes through endless mountain ranges, is given shelter by Buddhist monks, and eventually meets the Dalai Lama himself. Beautiful illustrations of Tibetan-style art, illuminated reproductions of Vladimir’s diary, and richly colored landscapes, all by the author, combine with the haunting story of a young boy’s longing for his absent father to create an enchanting and delightful piece of work.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-37552-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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