A loving, stirring portrait of the American cultural mosaic.
Fearless foreign correspondent buys a fixer-upper in a different kind of war zone: West Harlem.
For two decades, Matloff (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; Fragments of a Forgotten War, 1997) was a restlessly globetrotting, danger-hunting reporter. In April 2000, she decided to put down roots. With her Dutch husband John, also a roving writer, she purchased a once-beautiful building between Broadway and Amsterdam in the West 140s in Manhattan. Matloff says that the neighborhood seemed even less safe than when she visited her first boyfriend there back in the crime-plagued late-’70s. Her street was an open-air drug market. The manic crack addict squatting next door continually threatened her, claiming that the house was actually his. The dozens of nearby “nail salons” and “shoe stores” were actually money-laundering fronts for cash being sent back home; most of the neighborhood came from the same village in the Dominican Republic. Blessed with a knack for making friends (the years on assignment in Latin America helped, too), the author was quickly on good terms with a grumpy caretaker and a refined, Latin-quoting addict; she even struck a deal with the drug crew’s boss to keep his guys off her property. She and John supervised an ill-assorted gang of renovators: The Mexican mocked the Honduran who in turn derided the Dominicans. Matloff, raised in a liberal Jewish family, was almost as surprised by their unembarrassed battling along ethnic lines as she was by the animosity black neighborhood activists displayed toward the local Dominicans. The author avoids nonfiction chick-lit cliché, even when describing such milestones as 9/11 or her pregnancy; her journalistic curiosity and lightly self-deprecating touch keep the book from becoming an uptown safari for the Elle Decor set. She rarely focuses on herself or even the house, but rather on her thrilling, problem-plagued neighborhood, colorfully portrayed in terms that are neither frightened nor naïve.
A loving, stirring portrait of the American cultural mosaic.Pub Date: June 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6526-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
