Bold, well-crafted essays on living, loving, and striving while black.
Courage and outrage inform 13 essays about black womanhood.
Novelist, memoirist, and essayist McLarin (Writing, Literature, and Publishing/Emerson Col..; Divorce Dog: Men, Motherhood and Midlife, 2015, etc.) gathers forthright essays reflecting on love, friendship, motherhood, and, above all, overt and “thinly-veiled” expressions of racism. At 15, McLarin left home to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, where she felt a growing anger at “an omnipresent cultural representation of Blackness as ugliness” and at an elite white community that deemed her an outsider. “This place, this world, these people do not mean for you to live,” she believed. “You can go along and die. Or you can get pissed.” Her anger “was safe and energizing and life-saving” but also isolating. Anger abated a bit at Duke only to surface again when she began to work as a journalist, where “resentful white reporters” whispered that she had gotten her job only because she was black and where she covered the effects of poverty, prejudice, and injustice. “I’ve been labeled angry, aloof, and even uppity,” she writes, by people who could not “understand the origins of such projections.” McLarin praises the Obamas for their “calm, centered, not-taking-it-personally response” to the endemic racism that “is as American as apple pie.” Not as serene, after being “mistreated, disrespected, or generally screwed-over or wronged” 359 times (a “guesstimate”) in her life, she twice resorted to revenge. And beginning when she was 17, she suffered recurrences of debilitating depression, a malady she had thought affected only whites: “Mental illness, mental disorder of any possible stripe, was definitely white folks’ mess.” In her candid title essay, she considers her transition from girlhood to womanhood, the female body, and her experiences of midlife online dating, where misogyny was apparent—misogyny, like racism, rooted in fear. “What white America fears,” she writes, “is not Black people but the loss of white identity, privilege and position the Black presence demands and also the spiritual and culture power Black survival has produced.”
Bold, well-crafted essays on living, loving, and striving while black.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63246-079-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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