Cultural history and memoir gracefully entwined.
A journalist debuts with a memoir of the struggles of his Armenian family to survive the political and military complexities and cruelties of the past century.
The history of Armenia is tangled, and the author wisely focuses on three principal biographical threads. The signal event is the massive 1988 earthquake that shook the region, killing tens of thousands of Armenians and rendering homeless hundreds of thousands more. The author then segues to the 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Turks on the Armenians—1.5 million killed. One fortunate survivor was the author’s great-grandfather Kaspar, a teen at the time, whose story drives the first part of the narrative. After losing his entire family, Kaspar wandered through a wasteland—suffering, experiencing both startling kindness and cruelty—eventually making his way to the United States in 1920, where he found relatives in the San Joaquin Valley in California. He worked hard and accumulated power, prestige and wealth among other Armenian immigrants. One of his sons, Richard (the author’s grandfather), was a bookish lad who eventually became a UCLA professor, the world’s most respected scholar on Armenian history—the multivolume The Republic of Armenia is his masterwork. Richard’s son Raffi (the author’s father), who also earned academic honors and graduate degrees, settled into a high-paying legal career, then surrendered all and took his family abroad, where he labored for years among his people to try to bring them hope and political stability. In and out of political favor, Raffi enjoyed periods of great popularity, political exile and deep poverty. Raffi’s first son was Garin (the author), whose story weaves in and out of Raffi’s in the final pages. Hovannisian narratives in a swift, novel-like style, slowed only occasionally by the mass of detail and by the geographical and political complexity.
Cultural history and memoir gracefully entwined.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-179208-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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