A fascinating story in an occasionally frustrating recounting.
How does one weigh past evils against future good deeds? This is the central question of this at times compelling, at times vexing biographical sketch.
Dr. Anne Marie Spoerry (1918-1999) spent 50 years in East Africa, primarily in Kenya, serving local people. She was a “flying doctor” who, utilizing her pilot’s license and a rickety but reliable old plane, traveled to remote areas to provide much-needed health care to generations of Kenyans. “Mama Daktari” was a legend to thousands. But she also held deep secrets. During World War II, Spoerry had worked in the French Resistance against the Nazis; when she was caught, she ended up at the notorious Ravensbrück camp. Subsequently, she kept her war experiences almost wholly to herself, in part because she surely suffered, but also because while there, she compromised—as any of us might have—and utilized access to a likely paramour, as well as her medical experience, to better position herself. In so doing, she tortured and killed other prisoners and sent others to their deaths. Heminway (Yonder: A Place in Montana, 2000, etc.), a writer and documentary filmmaker who has won two Emmys and two Peabody Awards, spends a great deal of time investigating Spoerry’s actions at Ravensbrück though surprisingly little exploring how to weigh them in light of her unquestionably virtuous deeds for the final decades of her life. Thus, the cranky white savior–type doctor (with awful bedside manner) who may have also collaborated with the Nazis becomes both hero and villain, as the author fails to interrogate the meaning of these contradictions. Furthermore, Heminway refers throughout to “Africa,” as if Africa the continent is an undifferentiated mass. He is telling a story almost exclusively based in Kenya, and yet he discusses Africa and Africans as if this massive continent of 1.2 billion people is a single country.
A fascinating story in an occasionally frustrating recounting.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3297-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
