An affecting tribute that distills larger social themes through a child’s perspective.
A debut coming-of-age memoir set during the civil rights era, as seen through the eyes of a young white girl.
The story elaborates on Barrow’s childhood memories of her family’s caretaker, Amelia, focusing on the family’s move from Chattanooga to New Jersey in 1959, just as racial tensions escalated and civil rights protests gained momentum. Amelia, a thick-set woman with support hose and Coke-bottle glasses whom the family calls “Mimi,” looked after Barrow and her five siblings as their parents lived entitled lives in suburbia. The memoir is largely told in a series of vignettes, and as racial violence plays out on the national stage, its implications are addressed in Barrow’s household. Each story is prefaced by a short description giving cultural context, ranging from the history of the slave-built walls on New England’s Block Island to the sit-ins at department stores across the South to the 1960 presidential election. However, the work’s most satisfying embellishments are the stretches of dialogue between Mimi and the two youngest children, Barrow and her brother Chuck. While Mimi irons, cooks and sews for the family, the youngest are always at her feet, and their conversations undulate with Southern rhythms as Mimi dispenses wise advice and homespun aphorisms. The loose episodic structure resembles the way that children form their worldviews, and Barrow shows how she began to piece together the depth of the racial divide, even in her own home, through overheard conversations and wallflower observations. These moments of reflection on social justice and adult morality thread through scenes of suburban childhood mischief. As Barrow grows, her understanding of Mimi’s strained relationship with her family takes on nuance and emotional depth. The author also shows a knack for the sensory details of afternoons whiled away at the beach or evenings exploring in the woods (“When my feet slid on the dry soil of the steep cliff ridges, I clutched the branches of small bayberry bushes”). Overall, Barrow effectively chronicles the slow fade of youthful earnestness and the searing disappointment of childhood realization.
An affecting tribute that distills larger social themes through a child’s perspective.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940014067
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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