Despite occasional choppy patches, a spirited memoir deeply committed to personal self-worth.
Snappy, jazzy memoir of a Dominican upbringing by a New York journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Despite efforts since the election of the first black president to assume race no longer matters in America, Cepeda (editor: And It Don’t Stop: The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years, 2004) asserts that constructing one’s identity requires expressing and celebrating its makeup. Cepeda’s parents hailed from Paradise, a neighborhood in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Their relationship was an oil-and-water whirlwind romance between a handsome singer and a 16-year-old child bride whose move to Upper Manhattan quickly soured on pecuniary exigencies and pregnancy. Cepeda lived first with her mother, who cleaned houses and held many jobs at once, through new boyfriends, relocation to San Francisco and more children, then with her father, now remarried to a white woman, back in New York. In this Dominican barrio, Cepeda spent her formative years attending Catholic school and being told she was “ass backward,” mastering street slang and class hierarchy, and enduring the grueling tennis lessons her father forced her to take. He also frequently compared her in a derogatory fashion to her mother as the worst of the Dominican lot. Love for her Dominican boyfriend and his family and shame assimilated in school created a conflicted sense of identity that often came out in fights; she identified with black culture, finding in hip-hop ideal expressions of her feelings. Later, in adulthood, with her daughter now in high school and her father recovering from heart surgery, Cepeda yearned to make peace with her conflicted selves and convinced him and other relatives to submit to DNA testing. Further revelations prompted trips to far-flung locations and compelled all of them to reconcile with deep-seated stereotypes of identity.
Despite occasional choppy patches, a spirited memoir deeply committed to personal self-worth.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451635867
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
