by Richard Moss Richard Moss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 17, 2018
An engaging account of a three-year odyssey of medicine and personal growth in the East.
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In this memoir, a newly certified New York City ear, nose, and throat specialist goes to Thailand to help the underprivileged and learn about the world and himself.
As one of five sons of a divorced mother, Moss grew up in the mean streets of the Bronx with little reason to expect that he’d someday get a degree in medicine. However, after overcoming several roadblocks and changes of mind, he committed himself to long years of medical study. Even after achieving his goal of becoming an otolaryngological surgeon, he was faced with an agonizing choice—set up a practice and start making good money or travel to a less-developed country and assist those in desperate need. Urged on by his interest in Eastern religion and a timely fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant (“Do not forsake your dreams for material security”), he took a job at a clinic in northern Thailand. Young and inexperienced, he dealt with horrific cancers and infections and an overwhelming lack of resources. However, he was deeply impressed with his colleagues’ resourcefulness and his patients’ calm acceptance of their conditions. He also fell in love with the leisurely pace of Thailand, where people walked more slowly than they did in New York. As he continued his practice in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh, Richard learned from his patients, other native people, and expatriates, and he even unexpectedly got married along the way. Overall, Moss (Matilda’s Triumph, 2013, etc.) has constructed a moving and persuasive memoir that will draw the reader in from the very first chapter. By interspersing italicized flashbacks of his early life among his evolving experiences in foreign lands, he adds texture and depth to both storylines. His portraits of the people he meets, his chronicle of his spiritual development, and his anecdotes about occasional culture clashes are all vivid and compelling. Some of the clinical and surgical scenes are grisly, but many also have the urgency and drama of an episode of ER—if not the pat, happy ending that such fiction often provides.
An engaging account of a three-year odyssey of medicine and personal growth in the East.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5951-7
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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