Watlington's story is so improbable, his thirst for experience so intense, his manner so heartfelt, that readers will look...
An Emmy Award–winner pens a coming-of-age tale in the tradition of Manchild in the Promised Land, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice.
Old enough to have been called “colored,” “Negro,” “black” and, finally, “African-American,” Watlington reached adolescence at the height of the civil rights movement. The son of a religious mother and a father embittered by Jim Crow, Watlington displayed youthful bad behavior that got him briefly exiled to the South Carolina home of his poverty-stricken grandparents. He returned to Harlem and a street career that included episodes as a purse-snatcher, gang leader, reform schooler and heroin addict, but his intellectual precocity and athletic talent made him the ideal affirmative-action candidate. Following stints at the Peddie and Hotchkiss Schools and NYU, and with the help of mentors both black and white, Watlington became an actor, a community leader, a playwright, a journalist and a screenwriter. During the ’70s, a toxic mixture of heroin and welfare all but destroyed his neighborhood and the many friends he periodically left behind during forays into the white world, which included Zelig-like brushes with the likes of Harry Belafonte, Robert De Niro, Melanie Griffith, Tina Brown and enduring relationships with actor Bruce Willis, author Gail Sheehy and film documentarian Barbara Kopple. Drug addiction threatened his interracial second marriage and forced him to come to terms with a life spent crossing between white and black America, where his default role had been to explain each side to the other.
Watlington's story is so improbable, his thirst for experience so intense, his manner so heartfelt, that readers will look past the occasional patches of overripe prose.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-27189-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
