A rare memoir of hard times that is both forgiving and perceptive.
Newcomer Summer, a young woman who grew up in shelters and then attended Harvard, movingly evokes the plight of the homeless.
A natural writer, Summer begins her story with her 1976 birth in California, where her mother, married to another man, had had a brief affair. Her father paid her mother $4,000 but had no contact with them. Summer recalls how, as they moved from Oregon to California and then finally to Boston, her mother increasingly couldn’t hold a job, and they had to rely on public assistance. She often subsisted on government-issued stale honey and peanut butter while growing up in shelters and public housing. The author is frank about her mother, a gentle, eccentric woman she dearly and loyally loved, though she was often angered by Mom’s inability to take care of her. The numerous moves, inadequate housing conditions, and insufficient food made schooling difficult, and Summer’s grades suffered. Then in her Boston high school she met Mr. Mac, one of those remarkable teachers who change lives. He encouraged her to apply to Harvard. There, knowing firsthand how easy it is for people to become unemployed and homeless, Summer was shocked while attending a freshman meeting to learn that her peers, all educated at elite institutions, thought of diversity only in racial terms. Not one knew any member of the white working class. Though she had difficulties adjusting, she eventually made friends, joined the previously all-male wrestling team, and finally made contact with her father, about whom she writes, “I have learned it is better not to live with anger, not to dwell in disappointment.” As well as telling her story with insight and a remarkable generosity of spirit, Summer quietly but insistently explores the meaning of the word “home,” chronicling her efforts to reconcile the intellectual and worldly home she found at Harvard with the one provided by her mother.
A rare memoir of hard times that is both forgiving and perceptive.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0102-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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