A wise and humane account that draws on a lifetime of exploring the border country and pondering its meaning.
A memoir that grapples with life, death, and documentary filmmaking on the United States–Mexico border.
Ferguson (co-author: Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail, 2010) grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and lived much of her life in the gorgeous yet dangerous terrain of the border country. A dance instructor who developed a passion for documentary filmmaking, she devoted seven years to creating a film about the indigenous Rarámuri people of Mexico. In the subtle first half of her memoir, the author recounts the tumultuous process that led to The Unholy Tarahumara (another name for the Rarámuri), which premiered in 1998. Ferguson is a sensitive writer, wary of excessively exoticizing the land and the people she meets, but she beautifully conveys the sense of wonder she feels with every trip across the border. That wonder turns to barely controlled rage, however, in the book’s second half, as Ferguson looks in the other direction, at migration from Mexico to the U.S. She describes how migrant deaths surged in the mid-1990s, from an annual average of 14 to several hundred—the equivalent, she writes, of a large passenger plane crashing into the desert every year. Outraged by the unfolding humanitarian crisis and the increasing militarization of the border, she joined groups that provide aid to migrants and began work on her next documentary, about a Rarámuri migrant woman who spent years held unjustly in an American psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, she suspected that, due to her activism, the government was watching her. She was detained and arrested by mysterious federal agents in the desert, and she began a relationship with a Mexican man who, despite his visa, lives in constant fear of deportation.
A wise and humane account that draws on a lifetime of exploring the border country and pondering its meaning.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8263-4058-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of New Mexico
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
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