Peeking through a mundane portrait of an ill-suited couple is a fascinating story about a childhood spent in an exotic land...
In this debut memoir, South African-born White condenses her story of marital strife in the book’s subtitle—“Holding Fast, Letting Go, and Then There’s the Dog.”
White was born and spent her childhood in Southern Africa during apartheid. As the eldest child of English parents, she lived in countries now known as Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. She contrasts the English with Afrikaaners, who spoke Afrikaans and were adherents of the restrictive Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church. Her parents were more open-minded, however, and while living in homes supplied by the mining company who employed her father, she spent happy times as an only child in the care of servants while eating fried worms and playing alongside baboons. When her brother was born with severe disabilities, the family dynamics deteriorated through her mother’s alcoholism and undiagnosed emotional problems along with her carefree father’s infidelities. Although eager to leave Africa as a young bride and mother, she always felt residual guilt about shirking her responsibilities as her brother’s protector. His declining health was the main impetus for her to visit Africa on one of her rare trips. But these facts are not laid out chronologically. The memoir is also an account of the dissolution of her second marriage, a 25-year adventure with Larry, an emotionally stunted surfer with a cruel streak. He periodically vanishes and had long before abdicated his responsibilities as a parent to his three daughters from his first marriage. White’s and his primary connection is their mutual adoration of their two Staffordshire Bull Terriers, one of whom suffers from a serious kidney disease requiring constant care. The strength of the book is the author’s insight about life in Africa. She describes how the American nuns in her primary school played softball and told their “colonial” students that “we were worse than the natives in the villages; they were to be pitied, whereas we were a bunch of ignorant white interlopers.” These scenes are vivid and engaging, as contrasted with too much information about the intimate activities of a couple clearly headed for divorce.
Peeking through a mundane portrait of an ill-suited couple is a fascinating story about a childhood spent in an exotic land and a family life full of secrets.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1938314506
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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