An often charming memoir that intertwines personal and political histories.
Terzian’s (The Immigrant’s Daughter, 2005) second memoir explores the author’s global quest for independence.
The author was born into an Armenian family in Cairo in the 1930s; her parents were refugees who had fled Turkey in the ’20s. Although the Egyptian capital—at that time—offered ethnic and religious freedom, Terzian was constrained by the misogyny of both her conservative father and the broader community. Her stepmother frequently told her that as a woman, she was “somebody else’s property.” But after getting an English-language education at a Catholic high school, Terzian was determined to become a professional, college-educated woman—not just a traditional Armenian housewife. Her foray into employment and self-sufficiency coincided with an increasingly nationalist climate in Egypt in which Armenians and other ethnic minorities were often denied employment. She explained to a European colleague that she was an Armenian, not an Arabic-speaking Egyptian, despite having been born in Egypt: “If I were a kitten and born in an oven would you call me bread?” she said. Terzian found autonomy—and escape—through a position with the United Nations’ World Health Organization. Her career in international aid eventually led her to an expatriate life in Leopoldville, Congo, and Lomé, Togo, as well as to travel around a rapidly de-colonizing Africa and Cold War–era Western and Eastern Europe. A trip to visit her brother in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic illustrates the complex relationships of diaspora communities to their distant, mythologized homelands. Similarly, Terzian’s exploration of her expatriate status in Africa raises questions about what it means to have a home country—or even a home. The author does have a tendency to fall into the memoirist’s trap of over-documenting details of travel and work assignments, and the book might have made the same impact with a shorter page count. Still, the impact it does have is significant. Through her own story, Terzian articulates the ways in which patriarchy, culture, bureaucracy, and politics challenge but never fully derail an independent woman’s ambitions.
An often charming memoir that intertwines personal and political histories.Pub Date: June 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1311-9
Page Count: 402
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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