A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.
A novelist revisits the country of her upbringing to learn her family’s story.
When she was 23 and living in Chicago, Colombia native Rojas Contreras endured a bout of amnesia, “just a few weeks of oblivion,” when she “crashed my bicycle into an opening car door.” For eight weeks, “I had no idea where I came from or where I was going, what city I was in, what my name was, and I did not even know the year.” As horrifying as that episode was, she was luckier than her mother: At age 8, Mami fell down a well in Ocaña, Colombia, after she felt “a hand on the small of her back, giving her a gentle push.” When she recovered eight months later, Mami had “the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices,” a gift her curandero (Latinx healer) father, Nono, had also possessed. In this poetic memoir, Rojas Contreras writes of the return trip she and her mother took to Colombia in 2012 to disinter Nono’s bones and tell his story. As the author writes, he was a man who knew “instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds”—the “secrets” Mami had inherited. Though the author too often relies on platitudes—e.g., “No one is above suffering”; “Hunger shapes us into a wisdom we cannot yet know”—the book derives considerable power from both her reminiscences of growing up in a nation where guerrilla groups and paramilitaries left bombs throughout Bogotá and its portrait of a loving family filled with colorful characters. Strongest of all are sections in which Rojas Contreras plays on the theme of amnesia to note that it pertains as much to willful maltreatment on the part of a country’s oppressors—she writes of the “highly destructive and orchestrated oppression” of Black and Indigenous peoples—as to individuals saddled with a medical affliction, calamities endured through no fault of the victims.
A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54666-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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