A soft-focus picture of how a determined young black woman made her way into the virtually all white, male world of transplant surgery. As a young child in Haiti, Toussaint was told by an old voodoo priest that she would become a physician and surgeon, a prediction that this former assistant director of the Howard University Hospital Transplant Center never forgot. Before revealing just how she made the prediction come true, she sketchily illustrates what the work of a liver transplant specialist involves by telling the stories of a couple of her patients. In the narration of her life that follows, an account that, despite the assistance of writer and editor Santaniello, is curiously short on specific details, such as names, dates, places, and schools she attended, there are a number of well-remembered scenes, but overall, the story has a vexing blurriness. She does, however, recall certain turning points clearly: her encounter with a high-school guidance counselor who tried vainly to direct her to technical school rather than a four-year college with pre-med courses, her post-college interview for a lowly job as lab-technician college, and a year later her medical school interview. Especially vivid is her recollection of an operating room incident in which she, a humble resident, takes quick action to avert a disaster and wins the chief surgeon's notice and approval. Glimpses of her love life and of her Haitain family add dimension to what remains, however, a shadowy self-portrait. Despite its shortcomings, Toussaint's story delivers a message not about miracles, but about hard work, dedication and persistence, good mentors, and, yes, some lucky breaks—a message not just for young black women, but for all young women fighting to win a place in a male profession. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-40723-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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