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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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