Reveals little of interest about Lady Q or the world she moved in.
The life of a Puerto Rican gangbanger on the cold Chicago streets, dully presented.
Having exhausted his own criminal exploits, Sanchez (Once a King, Always a King: The Unmaking of a Latin King, 2003, etc.) turns to female wrongdoing, as practiced and experienced by “Lady Q.” That was his co-author’s nickname when she was a ruthless member of the Latin Queens, female counterparts of Sanchez and his fellows in the Latin Kings. Growing up in Humboldt Park, Chicago’s gang-ridden Puerto Rican neighborhood, Sonia Rodriguez was alternately ignored and beaten by her near-psychotic mother, whose deadbeat boyfriends often degraded and sexually abused the girl. It’s no shock that Sonia took fast to teen rebellion and gangbanging. By the mid-1980s, she’d joined the Latin Queens and was taking part in drive-by shootings. After she broke the gang’s code by bragging about her affiliations on Oprah Winfrey’s local talk show while her real name and nickname were flashed on-screen, her mother sent her to relatives in rural Pennsylvania. She fell for a cousin, got pregnant and got herself and the child thrown out by her relatives. Back in Chicago, Lady Q caught the attention of Tino, imprisoned head of the Kings. She became his consort during one of her visits to him in jail (the Kings wielded vast power inside as well as on the streets) and vaulted up the chain of command. The predictable fall came with coke addiction and a stint in county; the book closes with some halfhearted talk about redemption. Related in the third person, the story loses much of its authenticity. The co-authors’ narrative style doesn’t help, whipsawing between a flat recital of events and canned bathos like, “The miracle of life has a way of blinding evil eyes and warming cold hearts.”
Reveals little of interest about Lady Q or the world she moved in.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55652-722-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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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