Credit Gessen with absorbing gobs of information, but this is a case in which a little learning may be a dangerous thing—for...
Unsettling medical memoir by a worried-but-still-well journalist who carries a breast-cancer gene.
Gessen (Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin’s Peace, 2004, etc.) has steeped herself in genetics lore—and conjecture—in this wide-ranging account of genetic information past, present and future. Her own story is often the focus, as she relates the deaths of her mother and other relatives from breast or ovarian cancers and traces the inheritance of the BRCA1 gene to her great-great-grandmother. The mother of one adopted and one biological child, she is considering having another baby, but the genetic counselor she consults advises an ovariectomy and perhaps a double mastectomy. As Gessen wrestles with decision-making, the text increasingly leans toward a deterministic view of genetic destiny: The BRCA genes do not simply increase the odds of cancer; they cause it, with more stubborn forms occurring at an earlier age. This pessimism colors her account as she reviews the history of genetics from the horrors of eugenics and Nazism to the discovery of the gene for the sickle-cell trait, which persists in the population because it increases protection against malaria. There is much discussion of Ashkenazi Jews and their genetic load of diseases, as well as the genetic problems of other groups. She lauds the clinicians who work with Amish and Mennonite groups in Pennsylvania, developing diets to stave off the worse effects of inherited metabolic diseases. Gessen rightly addresses such issues as the reliability of the new genome-testing firms and the value of tests in cases like Huntington’s, where the disease is inevitable but as yet untreatable in carriers. But the text is again disturbing as she moves on to discuss controversial behavior-related genes, even pondering whether her young son’s Russian heritage may make him vulnerable to alcoholism.
Credit Gessen with absorbing gobs of information, but this is a case in which a little learning may be a dangerous thing—for the author and her readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101362-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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