Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.
Toni Morrison’s novels elicit powerful feelings of fear, grief, and anger.
Friends and colleagues at the College of New Jersey, Bennett (Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts, 2014, etc.), Brown-Glaude (Higglers in Kingston: Women’s Informal Work in Jamaica, 2011, etc.), Jackson (Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body, 2010, etc.), and Williams (co-editor: Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, 2012) gathered informally for several years to discuss the novels of the iconic Nobel laureate: “Morrison is our griot, a singer and social commentator, the keeper of traditions and the exemplary engaged citizen of our world.” Black and white, three women and one man, all parents anxious about their children’s futures, they discovered that Morrison’s works spoke to each of them directly, helping them to understand what it means to be black in America and to “live whole in times of uncertainty.” To structure the conversations conveyed in this insightful group memoir, they agreed to focus on four novels—The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and A Mercy—assigning each to two writers to show how the same novel affects different readers. Besides offering close, fresh readings of Morrison’s narratives, the authors share personal stories about the experiences that have shaped them as readers. Bennett, for example, grew up knowing he was an anomaly in his racist military and law enforcement family. Reading Song of Solomon, he writes, gave him a “feeling of floating outside myself” that allowed him “to feel comfortable as an outsider.” Jackson, writing about Beloved, and Brown-Glaude, about Song of Solomon, reveal their fears as mothers, consumed by worry about how to keep a child safe in a world where so many unarmed young black people have been killed by police. “My fear is borne out of the unpredictability of those deaths,” Brown-Glaude writes. “And my fear, at times, turns to anger toward those mothers of white sons who do not have to live this way.”
Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-299-32494-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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