An unconventional but affecting biography.
A recounting of a teacher’s globe-trotting life written by a grateful student.
In 1966, debut author Simmonds was in the 10th grade in St. Kitts and eager to begin the study of the French language. He was immediately taken with his teacher, Zenaida “Zina” Katzen, who impressed him with her self-assured poise and bold teaching strategies. The author was so profoundly influenced by her example that he continued to study French and became a teacher as well, his professional emulation a kind of loving homage to her. Simmonds enjoyed a reunion with her in 1998 but resolved to learn more about her. He returned to St. Kitts in 2010, eight years after her death, to begin researching her life. The author unearthed a remarkably eventful soul—Katzen (originally Katzenellenbogen) was born in Siberia in 1911, the daughter of a respected medical doctor and virtuosic musician. The Russian Revolution forced her family to relocate in 1919, first to Japan and then to China. She spent six years (1926-32) as a student in Paris and graduated from the Sorbonne. After teaching in Shanghai, she moved to Chile—she may have worked for the Allies during World War II—and started her own school. Katzen moved to St. Kitts in 1961, shortly before she turned 50, and spent her last 42 years there. Katzen’s trajectory is cinematically adventurous, and the twine that holds together its diverse parts—tenderly captured by Simmonds—is her calling to be a teacher. The author is infectiously enthusiastic about the subject, and his research is meticulous. Also, he waxes philosophic about the consequences of laying bare the story of his “pedagogic idol,” a moving reflection on the advantage distance from our heroes provides. His methods can be idiosyncratic: He announces in a prefatory comment that he feels free to imaginatively fill in the lacunae of her life, without giving the reader any sense of when that occurs. Also, he allows Katzen’s correspondence to tell the tale of the last 40 years of her life, which can be meanderingly unfocused. Includes photos.
An unconventional but affecting biography.Pub Date: March 19, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 181
Publisher: ISS Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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