A quirky narrative of artfully reconstructed memories.
Hart (Journalism/Univ. of Oregon; The Assault of Laughter, 2005) takes a second crack at recording her coming-of-age years in 1970s Southern California.
While the author’s first memoir focused on her relationship with her lesbian mother, this one deals with not only that issue but also with her conflicted feelings about being white. When her parent’s marriage dissolved and her mother moved out of their upper-middle-class suburban home, taking the author and siblings with her to Oxnard, a farming community north of the city, Hart was drawn to the color, warmth and especially the food of the large Hispanic families nearby. Chapters end with tongue-in-cheek recipes for making such dishes as tortillas, frito boats, chimichangas and chili. Her father soon won primary custody of the children, and the end-of-chapter recipes change to such delicacies as “WASP Milkshake” and “White Girl Cookies.” Hart viewed her cultural background as pallid, banal and insipid, and her awkward teenage attempts to make her way into more vibrant and tradition-laden cultures were often disconcerting and disappointing. As a misfit college freshman at UC-Santa Cruz, she hooked up with a Mexican-American janitor, believing that as his girlfriend she had finally achieved cultural legitimacy. For a time they lived together in a ramshackle trailer on his parents’ ranch, but the disparities in their backgrounds and in their expectations and ambitions doomed the relationship, apparently ending her search for an identity in the Hispanic world. The concluding chapter recounts a disastrous post-college trip to Spain with her mother in which the two women were totally out of synch with each other. The book is filled with detailed conversations and particulars of dress, mannerisms and facial expressions that give it the feeling of a novel.
A quirky narrative of artfully reconstructed memories.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58005-294-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
