Nomvete’s willingness to unveil her affecting story makes for a moving read that will instill hope and inspiration.
Nomvete’s debut memoir recounts her struggle to find herself.
As a child, Nomvete’s activist parents were exiled from their native South Africa, and the author spent her childhood in other African countries and England. With the end of apartheid, she returned to her homeland to vote and ended up staying. Already a successful stage actress in England, she had no trouble landing work in South Africa, and she soon starred on the popular South African soap opera Generations. She became a celebrity, but the fame was difficult to handle. She found herself hiding in her home, and she sought solace in alcohol and cigarettes as well as the toxic relationships to which she seemed drawn. Though her work allowed her to meet and talk with both Nelson and Winnie Mandela, her personal life continued to unravel. She eventually left the soap opera while her own life took on its own soap opera–like quality. At her lowest point, she was living in her car and begging people for money. Her honest, unflinching memoir is told in a clear and readable style with poetic touches: “Idyllic. That is definitely how I would describe my childhood. Idyllic.” It mostly focuses on the time she spent in South Africa, and she describes in great detail her life as a successful actress. But there’s a bitter undercurrent when she recalls incidents where she felt that South African performers were not treated with the same respect as those from other countries: For instance, some performers were excluded from the VIP room at a function in a South African historical venue where Nelson Mandela was scheduled to appear, or the fact that she had to travel via a hot, uncomfortable bus to a foreign-film festival. She’s critical of the mistakes she made in her personal life, while she also attempts to justify some of the reasons behind her making such poor decisions. In recounting her own experiences, Nomvete also looks at some of the changes in the “new” South Africa, pointing out improvements but more often highlighting areas that still need to be addressed, such as the nation’s widespread poverty.
Nomvete’s willingness to unveil her affecting story makes for a moving read that will instill hope and inspiration.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477243251
Page Count: 198
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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