An alternatingly touching and humorous walk down memory lane that illuminates as often as it entertains. In an era in which big is assumed to be better and celebrity is envied, this seemingly “small” tale of an ordinary life might be easily dismissed as dull. That would be a mistake. Baxter, an African-American woman who has spent much of her life serving others, is a modern-day everywoman whose story will resonate for readers of every stripe. The seventh child in a family of eight, Baxter was raised by her mother after her father abandoned the family while she was still a child. Baxter tries picking cotton and then cooking for white families but eventually decides to head north to seek her fortune in New York City. She works for a variety of women, including the one responsible for bringing her and editor Gloria Bley Miller together. (Their regular chats during bus rides to visit their former employer—friend once she moves permanently to a nursing home prompt Miller to tape Baxter’s thoughts and reminiscences to create this book.) Baxter is an independent, folksy woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to express it. Here she talks—in a rather random yet still refreshing down-home way—about everything from kids and TV to the bombings of black churches in the South. Here’s an example of her independent-minded views: —When it came to getting married, I didn—t trust the men for marriage. And I just didn—t love anybody enough to say I was going to make it my life. I like having fun too much to marry somebody. . . . I—m not barricaded in no place with no guy who’s gonna tell me when I can come and when I can go.— Part memoir, part social history, this will make readers appreciate life’s smaller moments and, yes, feel lucky. (First printing of 125,000)
Pub Date: May 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40620-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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