A sometimes-saccharine but positive collection of personal and imagined accounts.
A woman charts her own life’s journey and provides an account of the African-American experience through a kaleidoscope of nonfiction essays and fictionalized vignettes.
Using “conversations, some in fantasy, most in reality,” this collection incorporates many years’ worth of essays, poems, songs, plays, and journal entries by Robinson (Brewer Genealogy, 2016) over her life as a writer and a storyteller. The collection is divided into five sections: “Expressions of Hope,” “Expressions of Wonder,” “Faith,” “Introspection,” and “Pain and Contemplation.” Except for the last, the tone is unvaryingly uplifting and often humorous. Robinson’s Christian beliefs are also infused into her work; for example, she includes short biblical verses at the beginning of each section and lyrics from public-domain spirituals in her plays. However, her faith is a touchstone rather than her primary subject, which is African-American history. When one historical figure, educator, and civil-rights activist, Mary McLeod Bethune, shows up as a subject in one of the plays, Robinson makes a key point about biographical fiction that also informs this work: “writers have to use their common sense and imagination while being as true as they can to all the information that is available to them.” In “Pain and Contemplation,” she grows more serious and laments disunity in families—the backbiting, pettiness, and dysfunction that can tear people apart or even kill them. Most of her characters are women, but she also memorably creates a grandfather who’s exploited by a troubled free spirit. The book aims for a tone similar to that of the famous 1954 E.B. White story “The Second Tree from the Corner,” but it falls short of White’s wit and wry style; instead, it’s a bit syrupy and too often peppered with exclamation points. Robinson also could have let her tales unfold more naturally, instead of offering long soliloquies and expository dialogue. The book’s portrayal of the way young people talk also seems a bit idealized and unrealistic (“Really! That’s neat”).
A sometimes-saccharine but positive collection of personal and imagined accounts.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-5306-6
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
