There’s a catharsis for all by the end but no smooth path or easy arrival.
A journalist comes to terms with the murder his beloved older brother committed, and a family tries to find some sort of redemption.
Bailey refuses to make things easy for either his readers or himself; he avoids pat analysis of the scourge of racism and never settles for simple answers. He implicates himself from the start, confessing that he had felt like murdering his wife and that he was enraged beyond reason at his teenage son, fearing that he would mature into the stereotype of a black thug so feared by society. The author admits that he resisted dating one woman to whom he was otherwise attracted because she was too dark and that he went to a predominantly white college rather than a historically black one even as he resented the entitlement and privilege surrounding him. If racism is partly responsible for the fate of men like Moochie, it could have just as easily been him. Instead, he has been left with what has been diagnosed as PTSD from his brother’s incarceration as well as a stutter that he has spent a lifetime trying to overcome. It is difficult to wrench these particulars into a conventional fable or morality tale, and the author doesn’t try. Instead, he wrestles with confusion and the contradiction of “how to love a murderer without excusing the murder.” Moochie had been a father figure to his younger brother, protecting their mother against the brutalities of the older man who had taken her as his child bride. He murdered a white man brutally and senselessly and has been sentenced to life in prison, where his attitudes on race have hardened. His brother became a journalist, writing about poverty and crime and racism for a predominantly white readership. At first, he wanted to deny Moochie’s guilt and prove his innocence, but then he had to make some sort of peace with what Moochie did and try to rise above it.
There’s a catharsis for all by the end but no smooth path or easy arrival.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-860-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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