Compassionate, memorable tales from a journalist who understands the significance of revealing the inner lives of...
Chronicling “the lives lurking beneath the surface of the everyday.”
Garcia (Riding Through Katrina With the Red Baron’s Ghost: A Memoir of Friendship, Family and a Life Writing Stories, 2018, etc.) demonstrates his strong reporting skills and empathetic writing in this collection of pieces previously published in Guernica, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. The timeliest piece is about the persecution of undocumented immigrants that has ramped up significantly since the election of Donald Trump. In a brief news story, the author learned about Sixto Paz, a Mexican man forestalling deportation by living in a church that “offered sanctuary to undocumented migrants.” Garcia traveled to Phoenix to meet Paz in person; as he has done so well in previous books, the author manages to extrapolate from this one individual’s story greater truths about a large down-and-out population. Garcia helps readers understand how the daily struggles that define and change his real-life protagonists are relevant to them. At times, the author inserts himself into the narratives, showing readers how his research and reporting affects him. Garcia closes the book with a story on Reynaldo Leal, a U.S. military veteran who completed two tours of duty in Iraq and began to realize, years later, that “most of the country has allowed the war to fade from its consciousness.” This piece is another in a long line of the author’s impressive stories about military veterans, their traumatic nightmares, and their less-than-adequate treatment by government agencies. Garcia also frequently investigates the broken U.S. criminal justice system, evident here in “What Happens After Sixteen Years in Prison?” The book’s subtitle rings true for each piece. One shortcoming: The anthology provides no value-added content, such as contextualizing sections or updates on the stories.
Compassionate, memorable tales from a journalist who understands the significance of revealing the inner lives of marginalized individuals.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60980-953-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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