At its best moments, good bubble-bath reading. But the best moments are rare.
A rambling, energetic memoir about identity and familial culture.
First-time author Anders, a special correspondent for the Washington Post, was born to Jewish parents in Cuba. In 1960, when she was three, her family fled to the U.S. Here, she describes the life of a “Jubana,” a Jewish-Cuban woman. Anders has a distinctive voice, and she’ll score with some readers because she explores an interesting and little-known subculture. The chapter devoted to her friendship with “her first WASP” will strike chords with Jewish readers everywhere. Unfortunately, though, she trades in stereotypes: Jubanas pop out of the womb trying to look pretty; they are sent to bed every night in panties, sometimes even a bra, and therefore have “no clue about [their] own sexual potential”; mothers of Jubanas spend their whole lives planning their daughters’ weddings, etc. Many of these ostensibly humorous forays into typecasting simply aren’t that funny. The strongest sections detail Anders’s relationship with her fiancé, including their argument about Elián González and their premarital visit with a Reform rabbi. Too often, though, her tic-ridden prose gets in the way of her stories. Her mother, for example, is quite a stitch, but the author’s attempts to capture Mami’s accent are hard to follow and annoying. (“Johs beeleeohns and zeeleeohns of eh-sperms and eggs just goheengh krehsee!”) Sometimes Anders’s idioms are quirky to the point of distraction, to wit her description of birth: “Okay. I’m out of Mami and home in my beautiful new hand-painted, imported crib.” And her handling of Spanish is irksome; she follows every foreign word with a translation set off by commas, as in “I’ve got a táta, a nanny . . . a cocinera, a cook . . . and a criada, a housekeeper.” Sales may benefit from the popularity of Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), but this memoir is not nearly as good.
At its best moments, good bubble-bath reading. But the best moments are rare.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-056369-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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