A giddily conversational account of finding racial peace within.
Thin-on-ideas memoir by an African-American journalist who grew up in Milwaukee but discovered her authentic black self through her experiences in Spain.
An upper-middle-class suburban Midwesterner, Tharps was accused in school of “talking White” and not “acting like a real Black person was supposed to.” Though she was popular and made friends easily, she was keenly aware of slurs and latent prejudice. By seventh grade, Tharps was sure Spain was going to be her salvation. “I wasn’t just studying Spanish because I had to learn a language,” she writes. “I wanted access into another world when this one got to be too much.” Yet when she followed her sister into American Field Service (AFS), an exchange program that allowed her to spend a summer abroad, she opted to explore her African roots in Casablanca. (Apparently no one told her Moroccans are Arabs.) Elitist Smith College was another odd choice for finding her “Blacker side”; ignored at the first meeting of the Black Students’ Alliance, she left in tears. Resolved to become a “multiculturalist,” Tharps finally got to Spain for her junior year abroad in Salamanca, where she was referred to as la morena and received numerous marriage proposals. After a series of goofy, unsuitable Spanish boyfriends, she met Manuel in a German class; he visited her in Milwaukee, and they later got married. Tharps embarked on a career as a journalist and moved to New York; she and Manuel had two sons. Her memoir records moments of harassment while traveling into Spain wearing dreadlocks (“a big black moving target”) and her troubling visit to Manuel’s birthplace, Cádiz, which in the days of the Atlantic trade had been a transfer point for slaves, some of whom remained in bondage in Andalusia. Though Tharps comes to recognize how her own cultural identity (“Kinky”) intersects with the Spanish (“Gazpacho”), the journey she chronicles isn’t exactly heavy on intellectual insights.
A giddily conversational account of finding racial peace within.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9647-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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