Apart from a few instances of schoolyard bullying and a creepy encounter with a boy cousin, there are few moments of real...
From London-based journalist Williams, an affecting memoir about growing up in two worlds, neither quite comfortable with the other.
The author was born in 1971 to a mother “from a well-heeled and titled Igbo family in Nigeria,” her father “a civil engineer from a privileged Krio family in Sierra Leone.” Neither was struggling. Yet, writes Williams, she was given up for “private fostering,” a kind of temporary adoption often used by poor immigrants seeking to establish themselves in their newfound country by working nonstop. As the narrative opens, her mother has left her with an elderly white woman named “Nanny” in a housing estate in rural Sussex and does not return for months. Months turned into years, with occasional deliverances in which her mother reclaimed her for a time, then returned her to Nanny “until she is old enough for boarding school.” Years turned into decades, and Anita-Precious Achaba, as she is known, was old enough to have a child of her own—and in so doing out of wedlock earned the ire of her mother, who warned her, “Just because you’re black, people are already making up their minds about you without even knowing what you’re capable of.” In between, Williams touches on themes that have every opportunity to come off syrupy, but she continually rescues the narrative from mawkishness. One important theme is the trope of abandonment. Another is the ineluctable sense of being different in a place in which ordinariness is a virtue—and there are degrees of difference, as when Williams describes a kindling friendship with a young neighbor across class and ethnic lines “Africans are stuck up,” her friend says, “they hate people like me. I’m Jamaican.”
Apart from a few instances of schoolyard bullying and a creepy encounter with a boy cousin, there are few moments of real drama in these pages, and yet the story moves along toward a satisfying conclusion that speaks to aspiration and desire. Well done.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-338-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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