Lyrical and heartfelt.
An essayist writes about how she tried to flee an oppressive home life only to find herself face to face with the demons she thought she had left behind.
Piety reigned supreme in Chaudhuri’s childhood home. Joy “was like a glimmer of sunshine that slip[ped] in through the cracks…but never quite settle[d],” and shame lurked in every corner. The author struggled to reconcile her family’s faith with her own emerging beliefs and desires. She learned about sexuality covertly, through the pornographic pictures a neighbor boy showed her and the furtive caresses she exchanged with a servant girl—and later, adolescent males equally hungry for sensual experience. At the same time, Chaudhuri bore witness to the soul-crushing frustrations of her parents. A promising singer, her mother found her dreams thwarted by marriage and teachers bent on breaking her spirit. Her father, a one-time top executive, fell from grace and never again regained his former professional status. Eager to step out of the shadows that religion, her parents’ failures and demands for academic perfection cast upon her, Chaudhuri applied to college in the United States. When she left Bangladesh to attend university in Massachusetts, she vowed never to “get attached to the idea of home,” as had her parents, opting instead for the freedom of a life that would “constantly keep her on the move.” She fell in love with Yameen, a fellow Muslim expatriate born in Tanzania. Rather than find comfort in each other and their mutual alienation, both descended into an isolated world defined by half-truths, infidelity, alcohol and abuse. An affair with a deeply religious American man broke the hold both Yameen and the past had over Chaudhuri. Relieved of the twin burdens of shame and grief, she learned to let go of self-punishing behaviors and embrace imperfection—in herself, her parents and her own tangled history—with love.
Lyrical and heartfelt.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-622-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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