A flimsy biography of the phenomenonally successful black author. The questions that come to mind after reading Patrick’s book have more to do with the nature of biography than with the nature of Terry McMillan. Is biography simply well-put-together research? If that’s the case, then Patrick’s work fits the bill, since there are facts to be picked up herein, such as where McMillan grew up and went to school, how many brothers and sisters she has, what she did for a day job while writing at night, and various other mechanics of how she came to be the first black woman author to have both a bestselling book and a box office hit with Waiting to Exhale. However, if the genre requires insight or a convincing argument that the life of its subject is relevant to readers, then this unauthorized biography falls short in any number of ways. Patrick gets off to a bumpy start with a defensive and occasionally whiny introduction that explains why the biography is unauthorized, which contains the usual reasons of the subject not wanting her biography written just yet and thus not participating in its creation. As the book continues, McMillan’s objections seem well justified, for not only is there little to be found here that could not be gleaned by reading her novels and a few interviews with her, but also what is here is written in a format that seems more suited to the adolescent reader than to the adults who are its probable consumers. Sentences describing McMillan’s ambition (“Maybe she could only afford water, but that didn’t stop her from looking at the soda bottles and visualizing!”) make it hard to think of this successful author as anything close to a real person. Curiosity about Terry McMillan would be better satisfied by reading her books. (8 pages b&w photos, unseen).
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20032-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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