A searing, personal account of race and racism in mid-century America.
Powerful debut memoir relates what happened after the author’s white mother and black father split up.
Cross (Journalism/Columbia Univ.) knew a lot about race from a very young age. People frowned at little June’s hair, said she looked Chinese, said she had her daddy’s lips. Her parents separated in January 1954, when she was a baby. Identified as “white” on her birth certificate, she lived with her mother, Norma, in New York for a few years, but then her skin got darker, and she could no longer “pass.” Before June was old enough to enter school, Norma sent her to live in Atlantic City with a middle-class black couple, Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul. Eventually, her mother married actor Larry Storch. June visited them in the summertime, but Norma always worried that her presence threatened Storch’s career. Meanwhile, Peggy loved her like a daughter, but they clashed as the ‘60s unfolded; the older woman had little patience for African-American radicalism and worried that June was limiting herself at Harvard by hanging out with other black students. The memoir follows Cross through college and beyond, into a successful career in journalism that included making an Emmy-winning documentary, also called Secret Daughter, about her childhood and her relationship with Norma. Here, she concludes that her mother “had done the right thing,” though she also knows that her childhood lefts its marks: “Trust eludes me. . . . I waited until middle age to marry. I never had children.” The kiddie voice employed in early chapters (“Paul’s God had a mommie called Virgin Mary”) is replaced by the middle of the book with a strong, even tone.
A searing, personal account of race and racism in mid-century America.Pub Date: May 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-88555-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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 2026 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.
