A joyful and humane exploration of the search for belonging.
Poet and novelist Kay (Creative Writing/Newcastle Univ.; The Lamplighter, 2009, etc.) recalls growing up black in a white adoptive family and the journey that reunited her with her birth parents.
Immediately after her birth in 1961, the author, the love-child of a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, was put up for adoption. Two Glaswegians with communist leanings, John and Helen Kay, brought her into their home a few weeks later to keep the first “coloured child” they had adopted, Maxwell, company. Despite the inevitable prejudice she encountered in her largely segregated environment, the life she shared with her unconventional “mum and dad” was happy, and she grew up comfortable in her own skin. But like most adopted children, she began to wonder about her real parents, creating elaborate fantasies about a beautiful mother who had been madly in love with a father she imagined as “a handsome cross between Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela.” It was only after she had reached adulthood and had given birth to her own child that Kay, prompted by questions regarding her medical history, decided to track down her parents. She finally met her mother Elizabeth, a “sad and troubled figure,” in 1991. More than a decade later, through a serendipitous series of events, Kay met her father, Jonathan, an academic turned fundamentalist Christian, in Nigeria. In the comic yet wrenching first meeting that would also be their last, Jonathan ritualistically attempted to cleanse his daughter and himself of past “sins.” By turns warm, funny and tender, Kay’s story offers insight into the universal human quest for self-knowledge.
A joyful and humane exploration of the search for belonging.Pub Date: April 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-935633-34-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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