Athill, a veteran London editor who 25 years ago published the autobiography of a black American militant, offers an engrossing account of their friendship—an account written with the same openness that apparently characterized an earlier memoir (After a Funeral, 1984—not reviewed). Hakim Jamal was born Al Donaldson in 1933 Boston. An unloved child, he was a wino at 12, an addict at 14, and a convict at 20- -until hearing Malcolm X turned his life around. Hakim, meanwhile, was immensely attractive to women. His one marriage (to a distant cousin of Malcolm's) lasted long enough to produce six kids; what ended it was his tempestuous affair with the actress Jean Seberg. Soon afterward, in 1969, he met Athill. They hit it off immediately. Looking past his rhetorical bluster, she found ``a touchstone for kindness and honesty.'' They became friends and occasional lovers; 14 years his senior, Athill felt a primarily maternal love (with a ``delicious'' whiff of incest). Then she noticed signs of craziness. Hakim really believed he was God, as did his love-blind English mistress, HalÇ. The heart of Athill's story here is an electrifying, 48-hour, three-way confrontation provoked by Hakim's return to the States; Hakim accuses Athill of possessing HalÇ's body, and Athill sees that Hakim's ``kind and loving madness'' has a frightening side (though her fear soon passes). Athill concludes that Hakim ``had an acute natural intelligence...increasingly confused by psychological disturbance''—a disturbance that led her to break off work on Hakim's second book (about Seberg). His downward spiral continued; his death, back in Boston, was violent and meaningless. Athill's charm, and her power, lies in her refusal to censor herself. Her partial self-portrait is unflinching; her portrait of Hakim is devastating. High-quality work that lights up the first list of this brand-new house.
Pub Date: March 30, 1994
ISBN: 1-883642-21-3
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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