A sad but fitting memorial to Bellil, who died of stomach cancer at age 31 in 2004.
Disturbing account of the author’s adolescence in Seine-Saint-Denis, a Parisian suburb crowded with low-rent high-rises and misguided youth.
Her parents, immigrants from Algiers, were critical and violent, often punishing Bellil by throwing her into the streets despite the dangers they knew lurked there. Neglected and rebellious, she was only 13 when she fell in with a neighborhood gang, 14 when they gang-raped her. Steeped in misguided traditions and worried about their reputations, her family and friends abandoned her and even blamed her for the rape. When she finally found the courage to break the neighborhood code of silence and file charges, the police and lawyers assigned to the case were indifferent and lazy, further instilling in Bellil a sense of bitter hopelessness. In gritty, vivid language, the author describes the rage she felt at facing her situation alone, the numbing relief of drugs, her increasing inability to keep mind and body whole. “[Acting out] was the only means I had,” she writes, “to vomit up the suffering that suffocated and devoured me so physically it was as if I were being eaten up by worms.” She suffered epileptic seizures, spent years in shelters, hospitals and the streets; her home was filled with tension, blame and alcohol-fueled altercations with her parents. Bellil often dreamed of the idyllic time she’d spent with a Belgian foster family while her father was in prison, and memories of that unconditional love kept her working toward a new life. She eventually found help in psychotherapy and wrote this memoir as part of her emotional recovery. Its publication in 2002 put the author at the forefront of a movement to force French officials to acknowledge and address the overlooked violence against young women in its squalid banlieues.
A sad but fitting memorial to Bellil, who died of stomach cancer at age 31 in 2004.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1356-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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