Though the story suffers somewhat in the telling, Starr is proud of his accomplishments, and he deserves to be.
One man’s amazing accomplishment in founding a school amid a series of daunting challenges.
Feeling unfulfilled in his career as a successful hedge fund manager, Starr invested $500,000 of his own as seed money for a secondary school in impoverished Somaliland. It is the homeland of his uncle, a place where formal education had long ended with third grade. Otherwise, the author knew little about the African country until he was already committed to the project. Nor did he bring much expertise in founding and running a school; he had just “one undergraduate education class at Emory,” and he had been something of an educational underachiever throughout his schooling. “People have commented that it took a tremendous confidence, bordering on arrogance, to think that I could take students from Somaliland and get them to the point where they could compete in the world’s best universities.” If there is a weakness to the narrative, it involves perspective and tone. Not that Starr is a glory hog—he gives full credit to his students, who have been accepted at the likes of Harvard and Oberlin. However, if Tracy Kidder had written this book, it would have a different perspective on the teachers who failed to fulfill their one-year contracts, the partner with whom Starr had a bitter falling out over control and credit, and the local population that feared the first white man many of them had ever seen was a missionary in disguise, intent on converting their children from Islam to Christianity. The author’s invocation of “my favorite college book, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” suggests that he subscribes to the “great man” theory of cultural accomplishment. Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue with Starr’s impressive results: “as of May 2016, Abaarso students have earned approximately $15 million in scholarships and financial aid, and the 2016-2017 school year will see almost ninety students studying around the world.”
Though the story suffers somewhat in the telling, Starr is proud of his accomplishments, and he deserves to be.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11346-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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