By turns delightful and frustrating.
Uneven follow-up to the Oprah-blessed hit Stolen Lives (2001).
That volume chronicled the 20 years the author and her family spent as political prisoners in Morocco. Here, Oufkir charts the strange process of returning to the world of the free. The strongest sections offer trenchant observations about ordinary life. Sickened by the ease with which people waste food, the author finds herself barely able to eat in restaurants; every time she sees a patron pick at complimentary bread and play with pats of butter, she remembers the rotten eggs that were her regular prison fare. She can’t quite get her head around credit cards or ATM machines, either. “We no longer call things by their names,” she declares, disdaining the replacement of plain words like “the elderly” with euphemisms like “seniors.” The book’s overall structure, thematic rather than chronological, works well, and translator Coverdale has crafted a conversational but never chatty tone. Oufkir’s description of her gradual recovery of healthy sexuality is honest and fascinating. Elsewhere, she falters. A chapter on fundamentalism has potential, but the author ultimately doesn’t have any real insight into how “religion set itself up handsomely” during her two decades in jail; the section peters out with an unsatisfying story about some Moroccan men who flirt with radical Islam, only to return to secularism. Oufkir can also be annoyingly coy and cagey; she devotes nine pages to the reparations she was paid by the Moroccan government but never tells the reader how much money she received. If she wanted to keep the details private, she should have cut the chapter; talking around the figure is simply distracting. And nattering on about publishing Stolen Lives and meeting Oprah Winfrey is a bit obnoxious.
By turns delightful and frustrating.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4013-5206-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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