An occasionally compelling memoir hampered by its incoherent structure.
A life of petty crime escalates into black-market dealings and murder in this debut memoir.
Maktari had a mother who abandoned him and a manipulative, uncaring father, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that he found himself underperforming in school, committing various crimes (including impersonating a Saudi prince), and living on the street for a period of time. This debut memoir isn’t written in strict chronological order, and the author covers up many details of his life to remain anonymous, so it’s difficult to piece together a clear timeline. But his criminal activity eventually led to a stint in prison and, once he got out, the more serious criminal underground. He didn’t ask his bosses many questions, as he was happy to have money, but he writes that in exchange for his obedience, he wound up having to kill people. He often alludes to the fact that his marriage suffered and eventually collapsed as a result of his lifestyle, but he gives few details, instead focusing on business. Specifically, he writes about the black-market gold trade, which ultimately led him to a surreal encounter in the Syrian desert with a mysterious royal and what Maktari describes as “tons” of gold. The memoir begins in a straightforward fashion, but by the end, it grows so splintered that it’s difficult to keep track of the story—which, in any case, may or may not be true. Although the author makes attempts at accepting accountability, it may be difficult for readers to feel sympathy for him. The memoir’s repeated use of derogatory language toward women doesn’t further its cause, nor do the last pages, which descend into ramblings about the world’s uncertain economic future.
An occasionally compelling memoir hampered by its incoherent structure.Pub Date: June 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482790740
Page Count: 148
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2013
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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