An enthralling remembrance of a difficult journey recounted with élan.
A businesswoman recounts her central role in the development of a Romanian gold mine in this engrossing debut memoir.
Onegina was born in New Zealand, the daughter of Romanian émigrés. Raised mainly by her grandmother, she was allowed only to socialize with Romanian children and was sent to a Romanian Saturday school. At 17, she began studying at the University of Auckland, majoring in biochemistry and biotechnology. Two years later, in 1969, she embarked for Bucharest via Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia). The tenacity of the author is evident as she deals with adversity: in Belgrade, she says, she was tricked and raped by her taxi driver. Then, in Bucharest, she was arrested and jailed for remaining in the country without a visa and for selling her Western clothes to make money. After being released after 11 days and told that she couldn’t return to Romania for seven years, she set up her own New Zealand business that she calls “ScienceStaff” in the text (“the world’s first scientific recruitment agency”), which would eventually sell for NZ$1 million. In 1979, she married an insurance salesman and they returned to Romania; so begins the spellbinding tale of Onegina setting up a mining company and attempting to collaborate with a local company to mine a Transylvanian gold mine. The names of people, locations, and corporations in this memoir have been changed, the author writes. This is particularly notable when Onegina works with high-profile figures, including the future prime minister of New Zealand, whom she refers to as “Mark Spencer,” a fictitious name. If it were real, the memoir would prove to be quite an exposé due to passages such as: “[Mark] confessed that he wished he’d been born an Arab so that he could have a harem. His secret desire, he went on, was to have lots of children with many beautiful women. He admitted freely he’d had many mistresses.” This unblinking directness reflects the author’s straightforward approach throughout. Onegina rightfully rejoices in her triumphs, but she’s also unafraid to discuss her disappointments, making for a well-balanced remembrance of a remarkable life.
An enthralling remembrance of a difficult journey recounted with élan.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-0119-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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