A remarkable tale of love, faith and perseverance that underscores the importance of preserving family history.
Lovell, in her debut biography, recounts the real-life courtship of her maternal grandparents through a treasured set of letters sent from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Jamaica in the early part of the 20th century.
In this well-structured work, Lovell produces an intimate portrait of her family members that encompasses broader themes of immigration, race, religion and community. After a devastating earthquake struck Jamaica in 1907, an educated young man named David Clarence Hurd made a decision to seek his fortune in America, the fabled land of opportunity, “[a]rmed with his Bible, $50, and a letter of introduction.” Six years later, Hurd (the “Papa” of the title) began a correspondence with Avril Louise Cato (who later became Lovell’s “Grandma”). Papa’s letters, presented here as one of the book’s five chapters, were originally published as a four-part series in New York City’s Carib News newspaper in 2010. Readers of that series provided feedback and questions that inspired Lovell to expand the scope of the project; this book includes four chapters of supplemental materials, including photographs, maps, historical context, additional research and reference notes, plus an introduction written by the author’s aunt, the youngest of Papa and Grandma’s six children. Toward the book’s end, Lovell intriguingly looks at her son Kwame’s experiences as a member of “Generation Y,” and compares her grandparents’ experience with current norms of courtship, including recent developments in technology and social media. In this context, readers may marvel at the fact that Lovell’s grandparents didn’t meet or even hear each other’s voice until the day before their wedding in 1914. (Telephone service had not yet been established in Jamaica.) Overall, readers will likely agree with Lovell’s description of Papa’s words: “I actually feel the loneliness of a Jamaican immigrant, miles away from home. I imagine the pain of a black man striving desperately to be successful in America, a foreign and often hostile place. I understand the excitement and anxiety of a fiancé planning for the first meeting of his beloved bride-to-be.”
A remarkable tale of love, faith and perseverance that underscores the importance of preserving family history.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477299760
Page Count: 150
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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