A useful reminder of the importance of education in slowing the spread of an epidemic.
Clark, a former AIDS educator for the United Nations who is now a creative writer and teacher, recounts pursuing her careers while living with HIV.
The author tells her story of coming to grips with being HIV-positive and then devoting herself to UN Cares, the program she helped launch in 2008. In the years she spent working for the U.N., she devoted her time to educating people about HIV and how to prevent its spread in workshops worldwide, and much of her job consisted of pushing back against denial and misinformation. Along the way, she discovered the power of sharing her story to demonstrate that people living with HIV aren’t as “different” as some people think. A revelation that some readers may find surprising is that she opposes mandatory HIV testing: “It’s our job to educate [staff members, soldiers, or civilians] so they will go for testing of their own volition,” she told a U.N. colleague. “It is not our place to force them to. We simply cannot do that. It would be unethical.” Her story includes an account of her brief marriage to a man who initially hid his mental health problems. She also demonstrates the importance of care for organizational staff, including self-care, as she needed to seek treatment for worsening effects of the virus. The book includes a postscript about when she came down with Covid-19, early in the pandemic. Clark offers an important personal account over the course of this remembrance. However, it’s not without its limitations. Although she notes her privilege as a straight White woman, she doesn’t dig deeply enough into people’s incorrect assumptions about who can and can’t become HIV-positive. Also, her discussion of her brief marriage and foster motherhood sidetracks the narrative. Finally, the book’s subtitle suggests that Covid-19 is a bigger part of the memoir than it ultimately is. Still, this book is vital to understanding how willful ignorance by those in charge assisted the spread of AIDS.
A useful reminder of the importance of education in slowing the spread of an epidemic.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 9781950668113
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Northampton House Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.
Fighting back against a nearly fatal health crisis, a renowned foreign correspondent reviews his career.
New York Times journalist Nordland, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has reported from more than 150 countries. Working in Delhi on July 4, 2019, he had a seizure and lost consciousness. At that point, he began his “second life,” one defined by a glioblastoma multiforme tumor. “From 3 to 6 percent of glioblastoma patients are cured; one of them will bear my name,” writes the author, while claiming that the disease “has proved to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” From the perspective of his second life, which marked the end of his estrangement from his adult children, he reflects on his first, which began with a difficult childhood in Philadelphia. His abusive father was a “predatory pedophile.” His mother, fortunately, was “astonishingly patient and saintly,” and Nordland and his younger siblings stuck close together. After a brief phase of youthful criminality, the author began his career in journalism at the Penn State campus newspaper. Interspersing numerous landmark articles—some less interesting than others, but the best are wonderful—Nordland shows how he carried out the burden of being his father’s son: “Whether in Bosnia or Kabul, Cambodia or Nigeria, Philadelphia or Baghdad, I always seemed to gravitate toward stories about vulnerable people, especially women and children—since they will always be the most vulnerable in any society—being exploited or mistreated by powerful men or powerful social norms.” Indeed, some of the stories reveal the worst in human nature. A final section, detailing his life since his diagnosis in chapters such as “I Forget the Name of This Chapter: On Memory,” wraps up the narrative with humor, candor, and reflection.
This is a man who has seen it all, and he sure does know how to tell a story.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063096226
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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