A judgment on those of us who had the temerity to laugh during Borat.
A melancholy, disheartening look back at a stolen Kazakh childhood.
Shayakhmetov tells the lamentably familiar story of the triumph of the better-armed. In this case, the victor is the Stalin-run Soviet Union, and the loser and the spoils both are the unwillingly collectivized nomads of Kazakhstan. Shayakhmetov was just seven years old in 1929 when his father, a slightly wealthier peasant than most, was branded a class traitor and sent to a prison camp to die. But this story begins much earlier, with the first colonial overtures of Russia into Kazakhstan in the 1880s, when a Russian commander declared “our business here is a Russian one…all the land populated by the Kazakhs is not their own,” to the disastrous Soviet policies of resettlement of the Steppe-dwelling nomads in the 1920s. Shayakhmetov survived the seizure of his family’s property and the destruction of his people’s lifestyle to eventually become a teacher and then a regional head of education in Kazakhstan. But from the first chapter, entitled “The Life We Lost,” it is clear that being forced to relinquish the ways of his childhood burned those details deeper into his memory. The elegant, mournful translation suits Shayakhmetov’s potent, detailed descriptions, such that readers will smell the seasons change, feel the rough yurt walls in which his family lived and visualize contented young boys herding goats on the Steppes. But these relatively peaceful times were all too brief. Soon his family and his tribe became embroiled in show trials and forced relocations, and the author was thrown out of school. The book ends as World War II is drawing to a close, but the changes wrought in that 16-year period are astonishing and terrible to behold.
A judgment on those of us who had the temerity to laugh during Borat.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58567-955-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rookery/Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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