An inventive and inspiring memoir from an innovative educator.
A fiction writer chronicles his journey teaching Detroit children to use words to give flight to their imaginations.
For 20 years, Michigan-based novelist and short story writer Markus (The Fish and the Not Fish, 2014, etc.) has worked at the InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit as a writer in residence and educator. In this book, he presents a series of quirky, charming essays that capture some of the exchanges he had with the young inner-city students he taught. Markus begins with a piece that recalls how he transformed an episode of tardiness to class into an occasion to tell his students about the “twelve-legged purple octopus with the goldfish-orange top hat” that made him late. “I wanted to talk to the kids about the powers of the imagination, how words can get us to believe in the unbelievable,” he writes. In “Inside My Magic Pencil,” Markus shares some of the creative visions of his “young seers”—which included everything from a giant purple squid eating a cheeseburger to a rainbow eyeball—after they looked inside pencils that Markus made them believe were “magic.” As he writes in “Caged Brains,” his intent was to make the children “see what nobody else has seen.” With eyes trained to “see beyond the surface,” his students, most of whom struggled with poverty, could then begin to look for beauty in everything from broken glass to crushed violets. In “Nothing Beautiful,” the author recounts how an 8-year-old girl who believed that “nothing is beautiful” in the world later discovered it in herself after her mother told her that she was beautiful. Markus writes in spare yet poetic language that is simple enough to be read and understood by younger readers. However, adults—especially writers and teachers—willing to see with their hearts as well as their minds will also be rewarded for reading this unique book.
An inventive and inspiring memoir from an innovative educator.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941531-86-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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