In a powerful yet theoretically overwrought memoir, Awkward (English/Univ. of Penn.) depicts the variegated influences that led him to become, in his terms, a —black male feminist.— Awkward grew up in Southwark, a rundown Philadelphia public housing project, in the early 1970s. He excelled in school but outside ran a cruel gauntlet—his alcoholic mother, the casual viciousness of ghetto-kid culture, the potentially lethal gangs—that left him bewildered over the notions of maleness projected by an environment in which sexuality was degraded and women were brutalized. Escaping on scholarship to private school, he was still confounded in this less dangerous environment by the strictures of the black students— clique, which was intensely leery of the —whiteboy— majority, and he faced similar experiences at Brandeis and throughout his teaching career at Michigan and Penn. Many moments in Awkward’s narrative—his musings on the death of his abusive father and on his mother’s descent into and recovery from alcoholism, for example—are imaginatively unsettling or intellectually provocative. But the author constantly interrupts his story to refashion it into a parable of African-American intellectual difference. Although some will enjoy Awkward’s flights into literary theory, he seems distracted by his own ideas and unable to resist dilating on every possible theory of blackness and gender. His recollections of his stricken childhood are thought-provoking and often scorching, but the important realities he recalls are diffused by his rhetorical fussing over the vagaries of identity politics. At once, then, a sobering memoir of one particular African-American child’s triumph over brutality and long odds, and an extended consideration of cultural issues that are not only more general but far more familiar.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8223-2402-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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