An elegantly written memoir that reflects more on world history than on personal history.
Marshall (Literature and Culture/New York Univ.; The Fisher King, 2000, etc.) recounts her coming of age in Brooklyn, the Caribbean and Africa.
She opens with “Homage to Mr. Hughes”—poet Langston, that is, who became Marshall’s mentor and friend after they met at a party celebrating the release of her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in 1959. Hughes subsequently invited the novice writer to accompany him on a cultural tour of Europe. Marshall’s warm, reverent portrait includes charming anecdotes about his affinity for nightlife and excerpts from his handwritten notes, always penned in green ink. Subsequent chapters are adapted from a series of lectures the author delivered at Harvard on “Bodies of Water.” Marshall focuses on the three that made up the triangular slave-trade route: the James River, the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. She mingles the history of each with the chronicle of her life and development as a writer. Her parents were from Barbados, a principal way station in the slave trade. They moved to Brooklyn, where Marshall grew up in a close-knit West Indian community and first discovered her passion for books. She drew inspiration for her early writing from Barbados and used the advance for Brown Girl to spend a year in the island nation revising her manuscript and reconnecting with her parents’ native ground. After receiving a 1962 Guggenheim grant she spent another year in the Caribbean, this time on Grenada and its tiny satellite island, where she attended an annual Big Drum/Nation Dance ceremony. The final chapter describes FESTAC ’77, a cultural festival that brought together in Nigeria artists from the entire African continent and from the diaspora to the Americas. Marshall and other Americans were welcomed as Omowalies (Yoruba for “the child has returned”). This sense of a far-flung African community informs the author’s lush descriptions and informative historical accounts, though these later portions of the book lack the approachable intimacy of her opening homage to Hughes.
An elegantly written memoir that reflects more on world history than on personal history.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-465-01359-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Basic Civitas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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