Loving and candid, as the best family stories are.
A rich celebration of life with three sisters.
In this clear-eyed but always loving description of her family, memoirist Ginsberg (Raising Blaze, 2002, etc.) explores the differing ways her siblings relate to each other, ways familiar to all who have sisters. Ginsberg lives in southern California, where she shares a home with her teenage son Blaze and her younger sister Maya. Her parents live close by, as do her two other sisters, Deja and Lavander, and only brother Bo. Ginsberg is the eldest, Deja the youngest, none is married, and Ginsberg is the only parent. The family gets together regularly for dinner and holidays, which are always lively, often contentious, but never nasty. Like an enlarged contingent of musketeers, they’re there for one another—helping Ginsberg with babysitting, comforting their mother when her only sister dies, and loyally attending Deja’s plays. They're also there to offer advice and sympathy when their various relationships with men don’t work out. In separate chapters, the author describes her relationship with each sister as well as with Bo. She explores their varying interactions and recalls the family’s past. Their free-spirited parents met in London in the early 1960s: her mother was from South Africa, her father from Brooklyn, and for many years the family moved often, from London to Brooklyn to South Africa to upstate New York and finally southern California. That kind of family experience unsurprisingly fostered tight-knit bonds. Ginsberg is closest to Maya and finds it most difficult to relate to Lavander, who pushes Ginsberg’s buttons more effectively than anyone else in the family. Lavander is also the only sister not in the entertainment business—she’s a realtor, while Ginsberg writes, Maya is a musician, and Debra an actor. Ginsberg particularly appreciates her sisters’ roles as exceptional aunties to developmentally challenged son Blaze.
Loving and candid, as the best family stories are.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052202-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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