Narrowly focused, but inspiring.
A harrowing memoir by an athlete who survived the Hutu-Tutsi genocide.
Tuhabonye grew up in Burundi, one of four children in the respected, devoutly Catholic Tutsi family. Driven yet sweet, he knew that “education was the key to my future,” and he studied hard. He also loved to run, and by the time he was a teenager dreamed of winning a running scholarship to a college in the U.S. Then, in October 1993, when Tuhabonye was in the middle of what should have been his last year of preparatory school, he was caught in an episode of senseless violence. A group of Hutus came to his school and killed most of the Tutsis with machetes. The rest of the Tutsi students, including Tuhabonye, were stacked in a burning pyre. During hours of agony, Tuhabonye was sustained by a voice that assured him that he would somehow get out alive. Indeed, he was the only Tutsi to survive the massacre. The story of that violent day is told in flashbacks interspersed throughout the otherwise chronological memoir, perhaps because co-author Brozek (Divorced from the Mob, 2004) knew the horrifying account of butchery would be too much for most readers to take all in one piece. After his miraculous escape from the Hutus, Tuhabonye faced a long recovery. That he is able to run again (he is now training for the 2008 Olympics) is impressive enough. Even more remarkable is his spiritual and personal recovery. Drawing on his unwavering faith, Tuhabonye forgives his Hutu tormentors. Later chapters describe his immigration to the U.S., graduation from Abilene Christian University and marriage to a fellow Burundian, with whom he now lives in Austin. The only element his moving book lacks is a sustained analysis of the Hutu-Tutsi struggles and Burundi’s political landscape, which would have given it broader appeal.
Narrowly focused, but inspiring.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-081751-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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