An expansive account of a culture-spanning life.
Joshi recounts his experiences on three continents in this debut autobiography.
Born in Jamkhandi, India, in 1924 in his grandfather’s mud-walled and thatched-roof house, Joshi grew up in a world strikingly different from the one readers know. The author illustrates the peculiarities of life in that era, from the quaint means of transportation to the colorful characters to the tragically high rates of disease and mortality. His father, a primary schoolteacher, worked to ensure that Joshi would receive a quality education. Winning a “poor boys fund” scholarship, he was able to study science at Karnatak College. During this time, he participated in Gandhi’s “Quit India” independence movement. His postgraduate education included a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cambridge and a research fellowship at the University of Chicago. Applying his knowledge of organic chemistry to pharmaceuticals, the author was able to help improve the standard of living for Indians and others around the world. Joshi takes the reader through a lifetime of travel and research, chronicling the joys and pains that come with love, family, and reaching one’s 90s. Joshi has learned how much changes over the course of nine decades and how much remains the same. His prose is deliberative and highly detailed, displaying an impressive memory for the events of yesteryear. The most engrossing sections of the book are those related to his childhood, which occurred in an India that feels very remote from the modern America of Joshi’s present, as when he discusses his family’s Chitpavan Brahmin caste: “Some of my friends in school...used to tease me” that the Chitpavans “are calculating and miserly. The Chitpavans are said to come from the Middle East and landed on the west coast in a shipwreck.” As with many autobiographies, the work is episodic, with no strong narrative emerging. Some passages drag, and the relevance of each minor character or event isn’t always clear. Even so, the great scope of Joshi’s life should intrigue those interested in life in pre-independence India and in the experiences of the Indian diaspora in the West.
An expansive account of a culture-spanning life.Pub Date: April 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-4926-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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
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