Satisfying and surprising.
A refreshing debut memoir about growing up in between races and in between families.
Ragusa’s African-American mother and Italian-American father had a torrid fling that petered out after their daughter was conceived. As a child, she was shuttled back and forth between Harlem and New Jersey, living sometimes with maternal grandmother Miriam, sometimes with dad and his extended family. Indeed, this narrative of childhood isn’t so much about the author as it is about the people who raised her. In a loving, humanizing portrait of her Harlem apartment building, for example, Ragusa writes, “The women in the building literally kept it functioning”: cleaning the hallways, watching each other’s kids, taking the landlord to court when necessary. She knew her maternal great-grandmother only as an old lady, but drawing on photographs, a preserved flapper dress, census records and her grandmother’s stories, she is able to recreate the life and times of a bold, ballsy Harlem Renaissance hanger-on who went through husbands with an ease that rivaled Elizabeth Taylor’s. Ragusa is sensitive to the political implications of her life story. She feels ambivalent about light-skinned Miriam’s ability to hire a darker-skinned woman to care for her as a baby: “How do I speak of this without shame? I began my life within the shadow of a past that is impossible to escape.” When it comes to her parents’ failures—her father was a drug addict; her drop-dead gorgeous mother moved to Italy to follow a successful modeling career and a man, leaving Kym with Miriam—Ragusa is stunningly generous. She never sugar-coats, but neither does she indulge in rancor or endless complaining about dysfunctional family dynamics. The book occasionally meanders, the ending is abrupt and the author has a tendency to rely on descriptions of photographs to move the story along. But these are forgivable missteps from a first-time author whose footing will be surer in the future.
Satisfying and surprising.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05890-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
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.
