A strange, unhappy marriage of the weird and the conventional. (B&w photos throughout)
A Southern woman explores in unremarkable prose the genesis and evolution of her racial attitudes.
Gunst (Born Fi’ Dead: A Journey Through the Jamaican Posse Underworld, 1995) was born into a privileged, fairly liberal Jewish household in South Carolina; her family once manufactured Sergeant’s flea collars. To a great extent, this is the story of a remarkable black woman, Rhoda Cobin Lloyd, who worked for decades as a nurse and nanny in the Gunst household. The author repeatedly refers to Rhoda as her “mother,” and her book ends as she chases down the few court records referring to her former nanny, then connects with Rhoda’s relatives. There’s a way in which this is also a conventional troubled-child memoir. The author was overweight. Mother didn’t seem to love her and said unkind things, dissuading Laurie from applying to Radcliffe by saying she wasn’t “Radcliffe material.” Daddy worried about the shape of her nose, drank too much and fooled around with another woman. Gunst became a cocaine addict while she was completing her Ph.D. (Harvard will no doubt be saddened to learn the source of her classroom euphoria.) She married twice and became an authority on Jamaican posses. Meanwhile, she relates without a scintilla of incredulity the tale of a Jamaican boy cured of debilitating head pain and a mysterious high fever by a “priestess” who invoked spirit aid. After Rhoda died in 1986, Gunst frequently conversed with her ghost, who continued to hang around like a good nanny. The author has a compelling story, especially for readers willing to suspend disbelief from a high, high branch. But she consistently eschews fresh language in favor of cliché: she has strokes of good fortune, when she isn’t a nervous wreck. The trite prose ineluctably leads to banalities, which in turn make even the most bizarre events seem somehow inconsequential.
A strange, unhappy marriage of the weird and the conventional. (B&w photos throughout)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-56947-400-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
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