A heartfelt chronicle of a young Cuban refugee’s experiences in the United States.
A memoir of childhood by a Cuban exile.
Martínez (The Ballerina and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich, 2014, etc.) recounts his experiences as part of Operación Pedro Pan, a secretive program in the early 1960s that brought 14,000 Cuban minors to the United States. Martínez begins with vivid memories of landing in Miami on April 23, 1962, when he was 18, and being held for hours in a glass immigration waiting room. He recounts the moment that he realized that his “world had changed”—when his family received a telegram informing them that American visas had been approved for him and his 14-year-old brother, Beni. What others saw as a blessing, a young Martínez saw as a sort of death sentence, stripping him of a bright future as a pianist. Now he was saddled with the responsibility of caring for his brother, and with the expectation that he would secure visas for his parents and sisters, as well. Martínez describes his life in a refugee camp for Cuban youth, his experiences with several foster families, and instances of sexual abuse by adults. He also expresses his exasperation as he witnessed frequent shifts in American relations with Cuba, which threatened to upend his familial duty. Martínez’s prose is accented by creative metaphors, although readers will likely find a few of them offensive, such as his description of “a Haitian woman of undetermined age” who “sported a nose that spanned two continents.” Overall, the text effectively underscores the author’s love of music, as it starts with a turbulent movement of upheaval, crescendos as he took control of his own future, and ends with a coda of self-reflection. Along the way, Martínez’s writing earnestly explores many aspects of coming of age; this includes his sexuality, which plays a central part in his narrative. Over the course of the book, he describes his struggles to understand his feelings of same-sex attraction in an atmosphere of cultural and religious intolerance.
A heartfelt chronicle of a young Cuban refugee’s experiences in the United States.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5009-5218-1
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
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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