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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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