Zachary’s witty tale of opposites attracted also provides an illuminating portrait of African and American daily lives.
An American journalist finds the loves of his life in Africa.
New York Times columnist Zachary (Journalism and Writing/Stanford Univ.; The Diversity Advantage: Multicultural Identity in the New World Economy, 2003) delves within to examine the development of his relationship with his wife. In July 2001, he retreated to Ghana to write a mystery novel. At the Accra Zoo he met Chizo Okon, keeper of an abandoned chimpanzee. The novel went nowhere, but the two fell in love as they spent the next few weeks together. Seeking to unravel the mysterious attraction between a Jew from Flatbush (transplanted to northern California) and an Igbo woman from Nigeria, the author attributes some of it to the joie de vivre culture of Ghana, where their relationship blossomed. “I sensed I could learn important lessons from this African woman,” he writes, “at least about living in the present. Until I met her, I had lived only in the past and in the future…This woman immersed herself in the fullness of the moment with a curious ease that I took for wisdom…I wanted a present and, I would later come to realize, she wanted a past and a future.” Though the narrative revolves around the couple’s negotiation of issues arising from their differing skin colors and cultural bases—Zachary’s depictions of the in-law introductions for each partner are priceless—it also reveals the author’s great affection for Africa. “In America, life is cloaked in a heavy garment of fear, anxiety and the relentless drive for self-protection,” she writes. “In Africa, outer armor is stripped away, and people are permitted—dare I say entitled?—to experience the rawness of their own solitary human predicament. For reasons I cannot comprehend, in Africa I feel more human than in America.”
Zachary’s witty tale of opposites attracted also provides an illuminating portrait of African and American daily lives.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3463-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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