Searing and somber, punctuated with illuminating flickers of hope.
Journalist Itano chronicles the state of AIDS in Africa through the eyes of three families.
In 2001, Itano began a five-year stint in the continent home to five million HIV-positive people, with many more still unaware of their status. She relates her story in three parts (Denial, Despair, Hope), and each section profiles a family dealing with AIDS in different areas of Africa and their valiant personal struggles for survival. Itano tracks the varied theories and repercussions of AIDS back to its probable African origins from the early 1970s, when the medical community became increasingly baffled by the manifestation of some rare strains of life-threatening infections in gay men and IV-drug users. Currently, with limited availability of treatment options in Africa, severe illness can be swift, with impending death a certainty. Eight months after her HIV-positive diagnosis, Adeline Majoro, a native of Lesotho (a tiny, poverty-stricken country at the southern tip of the African continent) and mother of two-year-old son Bokang, met Itano at a gathering of unified civilians infected with HIV called Positive Action. Itano observed Adeline bravely embracing her aspirations to become a chartered accountant, while her health continued to decline. In Ingwavuma, South Africa, doting mother “Gogo” Nywao gathered her family into the small hut they call home as the disease robbed her of her children one by one. The hopeful final segment, a bittersweet success story in Botswana with a mother named Seeletso, imparts a renewed optimism for those suffering in Africa: dedicated care and government grants to support HIV-positive children, increased availability of life-saving antiretroviral drugs and Africa’s long-awaited recognition of the AIDS pandemic resulting in widespread government-sponsored clinics where more of the population can get tested. Itano’s profiles are predominately female because women not only comprise 60 percent of Africans with AIDS, but they are the only demographic willing to confront and discuss their infection without fear or shame.
Searing and somber, punctuated with illuminating flickers of hope.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7095-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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