A flawed but honest memoir about looking beyond hate to find some semblance of peace on the other side.
How one woman handled racial prejudice in her family.
Born to a white, Jewish mother and black father, TV and film producer Gad was adopted by a white Jewish family when she was 3. In the eyes of many in her adopted, extended family, she wasn’t white, black, or Jewish, and this was never more evident than with her Great-Aunt Nette, who refused to accept Gad as part of the family. In this somewhat rambling memoir, the author examines her childhood and the awkwardness she felt when people pointed out that she did not look like her mother or father—or that she couldn’t be Jewish because she was mixed-race. Nette was the worst of them all, displaying “a clear hatred” for Gad. Despite sharing some minor similarities with the author, such as craving chocolate cake in times of stress, Nette was constantly aloof or disparaging. The list of slights Gad experienced is long: Nette was happy to give the author’s younger sister her beloved jewelry but gave nothing to Gad; she also flew her sister from Chicago to California for a visit but never sent for Gad. When Nette began to suffer from Alzheimer’s, it was an ironic twist of fate that the only person who could help her was Gad. While the author could have turned her back on her great-aunt, she chose to endure further disdain to help Nette. Though the prose is often lackluster, Gad’s message about resisting hate is solid. “I know far too many people that let the anger…about what it is to live with the constant burn of racism and hate consume them….I choose love…because I will not be an instrument that puts more hate into the world.”
A flawed but honest memoir about looking beyond hate to find some semblance of peace on the other side.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-57284-275-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bolden/Agate
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
