A slim yet potent and intimately ruminative debut memoir on travel, maturity, and culture.
A writer and editor considers how the places he’s called home have ultimately defined him as an African-American man.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s American Lives series, McCrary writes of becoming aware of his black heritage early in life but also about the impression his skin color had on others in small-town Normal, Illinois, in the 1980s and '90s. Spending his childhood on the campus of Illinois State University, “a place engineered for surface-level equality,” where his parents met and began a family, the author was greatly influenced by the wisdom of James Baldwin. McCrary traverses some rich territory in his lifetime so far, delivering insightful essays on racial and identity issues, class assumptions, family pride, and his own sexuality. He admits to a youthful reluctance to embrace his black heritage and that this type of self-segregation still endures: “Outside of my family I’ve managed to remain close to no other black people,” he concedes, adding that it is not “a real excuse; more a reason spurred by my discomfort with the subtleties of race in my hometown.” This kind of refreshing honesty and frank self-examination permeates the pages of the memoir, in which McCrary also contemplates the inherent queerness that emerged during childhood but didn’t solidify due to “fear and convenience” until his college years. He was waiting, he writes, for “something more dramatic than schoolboy crushes to shake me into myself.” Spending his 20s in Chicago matured and freed him from the restraints of suburban life but not enough to allow him to come to true terms with his sexuality. Through self-admitted “muddy but invaluable” experiences, McCrary’s authentic identity and self-confidence eventually emerged after years of self-loathing behaviors. He reflects fondly on his time studying abroad in Prague, a city he courts an active obsession with, a “geographic flirtation” fortified by Czech history, heritage, food and drink, and cabaret adventures.
A slim yet potent and intimately ruminative debut memoir on travel, maturity, and culture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0786-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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