A compelling story of a powerful woman, a persecuted people, a tortured time and a granddaughter’s deep respect for her...
London journalist Benjamin (Rocket Dreams, 2003, etc.) recounts her return to Baghdad in 2004 to see what remained of the once-thriving Jewish community that had included her own family.
Before the 1950s, Jews composed about a third of Baghdad’s population, but by the time the author slipped into the war-ravaged city, fewer than two dozen remained. A half-century ago, many of these Baghdadi Jews were so assimilated that they thought of themselves as Iraqis; they were stunned when changing political and economic factors caused those they considered fellow citizens to persecute and even execute them. (Readers may remember Otto Frank, a German who’d fought for his country in WWI and could not imagine the Nazis would ever come for him.) The author’s family had been in Iraq for generations, but Benjamin’s story focuses on her grandmother Regina, born 1905 and widowed in 1942, who endured much deprivation and hostility before finding a way to leave with her three children, in 1950. Regina emerges as a strong, imaginative woman who raised her children in the face of unlikely odds, then planned and executed a tense, but successful, escape. The author pauses periodically to discuss the history of Iraq and its Jewish population. She inserts her grandmother’s story amid pieces of her own. Near the end, she describes her harrowing experiences as a Western Jewish woman in the streets of the world’s most dangerous city. She visits her grandmother’s old neighborhood, interviews the few Jews who remain and has little good to say about America’s motives or behavior in the region. Readers may wish that Benjamin had spent a little more time crafting her sentences; she far too often uses very ordinary language to narrate extraordinary events and describe remarkable people.
A compelling story of a powerful woman, a persecuted people, a tortured time and a granddaughter’s deep respect for her family.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5843-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 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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