Brown couldn’t sleep until she knew why that little girl wanted a quarter. Few among us better deserve a good night’s rest.
A hard-won, practical tale of adopting a class of students and guaranteeing them a college education if they want it. And Brown works hard to convince them that, for most, college is the only road to advancement.
In 1987, in her ratty neighborhood of East Oakland, California, Brown was asked by a child, “Lady, can I have a quarter?” But Brown was nobody’s fool, not even a six-year-old’s, so, since she was shopping anyway, she told the girl to go get what she wanted—which turned out to be staple items, not candy or soda. As a result, Brown, a real-estate saleswoman with a salary of $45,000, picked up the tab and was haunted by the encounter. She unsuccessfully tried to locate the girl at a local elementary school, but she did find a class of 23 first-graders who grabbed her heart. Damning the consequences, she told the school principal that she would pay for each of the students to attend college if they ended up wanting that. This isn’t just a heartwarming story, but it’s about Brown’s conviction that without a college diploma you’re rowing upstream, as she says, and that the hard road to college is going to make thinking people out of her charges. It’s also a story about dedication. From the start, Brown was there, on the phone, in the classroom, in living rooms, addressing all kinds of doubt and crisis, tendering absolutes when needed—stay away from drugs, period—along with more nuanced advice about self-respect and social awareness. Brown is plainspoken, giving her views on everything from sternness to listening, the impact of special people in your life, to practical matters of setting up trust accounts and saving for your own child’s higher education, even when your income is scant.
Brown couldn’t sleep until she knew why that little girl wanted a quarter. Few among us better deserve a good night’s rest.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51147-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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