Havana emerges as a city like no other: a place where humans, in many ways, are at their most vibrantly human.
The EU Ambassador to Cuba pens a temperate love letter to Havana.
Portocarero (All Demons’ Day: The Havana Pirate Manuscript, 2008, etc.), who has published extensively in Europe, tells us that he is not offering an academic but a personal history: “a rambling walkabout,” he calls it. And so it is. In nearly 90 small subsections, the author takes us to various neighborhoods, monuments, ruins, and street festivals; introduces us to artists; and briefly discusses a wide range of subjects, from religion to Hemingway to revolution to the Bay of Pigs to papal visits and to the recent historic return of the U.S. in the person of President Barack Obama, of whom Portocarero is clearly a fan. Some of the author’s topics are what readers will expect, but there are others that will no doubt surprise—e.g., the increasing Muslim presence, a classical ballet company, the history of slavery, the rise of soccer popularity in a country long noted for its baseball-mania, and the death penalty, which has been outlawed since 2005. (Oddly, Portocarero does not discuss the health care system.) The author also makes continual note of the carnal aspects of Cuban life, from decades ago to the present. He admits that many people associate such things with Havana, and he finds them appealing himself. He repeatedly laments the sad state of the historical buildings and homes in and around the city, and he believes many are beyond repair. Refreshingly, the author is not afraid to mention things he does not admire—the limited freedoms, the government-controlled press, the economic models the country embraces—but he remains an ardent advocate for a city electrified with life and passion.
Havana emerges as a city like no other: a place where humans, in many ways, are at their most vibrantly human.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-933527-88-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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