A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism—but remains too intensely subjective throughout to...
An intensely felt but highly personal account by an African-American academic of the journey she took from Christianity to Tibetan Buddhism—and back.
Raised in the 1950s in Docena, a small Alabama mining town, Willis attended segregated schools and was an outstanding student. While still in high school in Birmingham, she faced down Bull Connor’s attack dogs; later, at Cornell, she became involved in radical politics. Acutely aware of racial injustice and angry at white intimidation—the Klan once burned a cross outside the family home one evening while her father was working the graveyard shift in the mine—she had to decide, after graduating from Cornell in 1969, between joining the Black Panthers or studying Buddhism in Nepal. Although she felt it was her responsibility as a “thinking Black person” to join the radical group, her inner self rebelled and she went instead to Nepal (which she had visited the previous year while learning Sanskrit in India). In Nepal, studying Buddhism with a wise and perceptive Lama, she began to find herself at peace and better able to confront the stings of racism. When the Lama told here that living with pride and humility in equal proportions was very difficult, she understood at once that he had identified “one of the deepest issues confronting not only her, but all African Americans.” Back in the US she began teaching, got a Ph.D., and was granted tenure at Wesleyan (where she still teaches). Raised a Baptist, she has returned to her childhood faith and now calls herself a “Baptist-Buddhist.” Although she describes her parents with affection, the heart of her story is the account of her transforming encounter with Buddhism, which enabled her to overcome racism and practice the loving-kindness that Christianity demands.
A moving story that aims to reconcile the experiences of faith and racism—but remains too intensely subjective throughout to rise above the level of personal memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57322-173-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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
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