A quick, inspirational story of overcoming adversity.
A touching debut memoir about a young Ugandan man who escapes poverty and becomes a mentor for others.
Katende writes that he was abandoned by his parents as an infant and spent his early years with his grandmother, wandering from village to village in search of food. To make matters worse, a terrifying insurrection against the country’s president sent them into hiding. After the war, Katende’s mother returned to live with them but then died of breast cancer in the late 1980s. The author considered ending his life with rat poison when he was in elementary school, but he didn’t have enough money to buy it. Instead, he persevered and began to excel at school and in sports. He eventually earned a scholarship to pursue an engineering degree at Kyambogo University in Kampala, Uganda. Katende credits much of his success to an accomplished soccer player and mentor he met there—Aloysius Kyazze, who fostered his Christian faith and encouraged him to play sports. In turn, the author says, he was inspired to help others succeed, and he founded SOM Chess Academy. His most notable protégé was the Ugandan chess champion Phiona Mutesi, whose story was portrayed in a 2012 book by the American journalist Tim Crothers and the 2016 Disney film Queen of Katwe. The first half of this fast-paced account includes commentary within stories of Katende’s early struggles. For example, an anecdote about his grandmother’s creative search for food is coupled with an account of chess strategy. Despite the author’s hardships throughout his life, the slim book’s tone is upbeat, and the second half—written with research partner and debut author Nathan Kiwere—presents heartfelt testimonies from Katende’s students. The author’s smooth-flowing prose is laced with poignant details; for example, in order to get hungry kids to come to the chess club, Katende says that he offered free bowls of porridge. There are several memorable people in these stories, as well, such as Sharif Wasswa Mbazira, who didn’t let severe disabilities affecting his limbs stop him from competing in chess tournaments in the United States.
A quick, inspirational story of overcoming adversity.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64146-377-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Made For Success Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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