Elegant and eloquent, and full of news from places about which we know too little.
A contemplative memoir of a privileged life in a poor place.
The house of the title stood, and perhaps still stands, 11 miles from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Born there in 1966, New York Times special correspondent Cooper (whose beat is now Condoleezza Rice) had the run of that “perfect and perfectly grand paradise,” with its five bedrooms and three bathrooms and baby grand piano, all “protected from the ravages of West African squalor and poverty by central air-conditioning, strategically placed coconut trees, and a private water well.” Yet, though perched on a hill above the rest, the house was no fortress. As Cooper writes, it was a magnet for rogues—burglars, that is, as distinct from thieves, who “worked for the government and stole money from the public treasury.” Lighter-skinned than many of her compatriots, Cooper was also an “Honorable,” one of the ethnic and social elite who lorded it over the poorer “Country” people of Liberia. A Country man with a Harvard doctorate, notes the author, would still rank below an Honorable “with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee.” In childhood games, it was the Honorables who got to shoot the Country people, and the Country people who got to play dead. Such are the perfect ingredients for a civil war, and civil war is what came. When it did, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, members of Cooper’s family were killed, her mother raped, an adopted sister lost, her family scattered and sent into exile in America. These terrible events occur at the book’s midpoint. What remains—rendered with aching nostalgia and wonderful language (“Wartime come, when they be evacuating people, you will be glad I not tryin to get on no helicopter in heels”)—is a voyage of return, through which the author seeks to recover the past and to find that missing sister, even as the war deepens over the years to come.
Elegant and eloquent, and full of news from places about which we know too little.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-6624-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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