A crude cautionary tale that lacks redemptive power.
A sad, sanguinary, and clumsy account of life and death among Chicago’s Puerto Rican street gangs.
Sanchez uses a pen name in this horrifying memoir to protect others, he claims, but since he admits to multiple felonies, including murder (no statute of limitations), it’s obviously for self-protection as well. Sanchez wishes to “provide some explanations for why kids join gangs” and hopes his efforts “can save the life of at least one kid.” He was born in Puerto Rico into an abusive home; his 74-year-old father did not last long, and his 16-year-old mother lived with a succession of monstrous men. Raped as a child by a male relative, Sanchez found life only worse after the “family” moved to Chicago when he was seven. His mother married Pedro (“fat, toothless, stinky, and loud”), and soon the boy was receiving regular beatings from both parents. As he grew older, he drifted into street life, had his initial sexual experience at 13 with a 35-year-old, began using drugs, and before long adopted the street code: “You have to learn to hurt people before they have a chance to hurt you.” Throughout, Sanchez relates events in remarkable detail, recalling names, dates, locations, and dialogue with a felicity that belies his repeated statements that he was high most of the time. (Was he keeping a diary?) The artless prose is rife with clichés (things hit him “like a ton of bricks”), usage errors (“between him and I” is a favorite locution), and inaccurate allusions (he thinks Frankenstein is the creature, not the creator). Far more serious than these stylistic flaws is the author’s failure to substantively reflect on his experience. His observations range from patent to ludicrous—after raping a girl, he concludes, “It seemed as if I was becoming coldhearted”—and he closes with the perfunctory advice that we must “take responsibility for our own neighborhoods.”
A crude cautionary tale that lacks redemptive power.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55652-401-3
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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