An often entertaining memoir that brings the Garcia family to life.
In this debut memoir, an artist recalls growing up in a large, tumultuous family in 1940s South-Central Los Angeles.
Born in 1942, Garcia was one of five children in a close-knit Mexican-American clan living in the Florence district of LA’s south side. Although money was tight and discipline sometimes strict, he remembers his childhood fondly, including days spent playing games and exploring with neighborhood kids; his mother’s cooking; camping trips; holidays; and evenings that the family spent listening to the radio. He tells of events during the years 1942 through 1954, in mostly chronological order. Each chapter starts with a list of that year’s top movies, songs, television shows, fashion icons and news events, which will provide readers with helpful context. The vignettes illustrate important episodes and themes, such as his two older brothers’ constant rivalry—which sometimes erupted even while they were serving as altar boys. At the Garcia house, church was an important part of their lives: “Father would abruptly knock three times…and in his heavy Dutch-accented voice bellow out, ‘Wake up, you bums; it’s time for Mass!’ ” Garcia’s tone throughout is humorous and affectionate, but not everything he relates about 1940s Los Angeles was idyllic. For example, there was gang violence, polio and child-beating nuns; Garcia even witnessed a Mother Superior punch a grade-schooler in the jaw: “That uppercut would have caught Joe Louis by surprise.” Some readers may find it hard to view the hard physical punishment of small children as tolerantly as the author does; at one point, for example, when Garcia was 3, he messed with his grandmother’s face powder and got “a whack to my butt that would knock a conquistador right out of his armor.” Mostly, however, the author focuses on happy memories of caring parents and a warm extended family; although kids today might see him as deprived, with no TV or video games, for Garcia, “[i]t was a time when children’s creativity was fueled by need, a time when we learned to make do with what we had.” Garcia, who later became a restaurant designer and artist, illustrates the book with his own paintings.
An often entertaining memoir that brings the Garcia family to life.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495456039
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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