A valuable contribution to the literature of race and its problematics.
“You’re the blackest white girl I’ve ever seen”: Writer and translator Valentine explores a past that had been carefully hidden from her.
There are phenotypes, and then there are culture, nature and nurture, and all that comes between. Born in 1977, the author, whose biological father was African American, grew up thinking she was Irish and Italian, the fact of her parentage deliberately hidden. “I didn’t know much about race,” she writes of a childhood friendship with a child who looked like her, “but I knew it existed; I thought some people were black, but most people were normal.” That learned sense of “normalcy” comes under close examination in this deftly written book, marked by all kinds of telling milestones: Her classmates called her “Slash,” the nickname of the mixed-race Guns N’ Roses guitarist, while a Nigerian guest speaker in a middle school social studies class called on her to model a fabric used in traditional clothing, yielding a dawning awareness that she, and not someone else, was “the other.” The point was driven home when a guidance counselor encouraged her to apply for minority scholarships, to which her adoptive father responded that she would be depriving someone who needed them; he added, “don’t tell your mother about this." Her family’s denial of the obvious seems puzzling, but Valentine has much to say about the intersection of the personal, the biological, and the cultural. She writes, for instance, that she became a fluent speaker of Russian, with the ability to think and write at a highly accomplished level about Russian literature and with plenty of time on the ground in Russia, but all that near-native ability “didn’t make me Russian.” In a nice turn, she later writes of discovering the existence of a diasporic group that moved into the Caucasus in the 17th century, “making them literal African Caucasians.” Valentine’s journey of self-discovery is affecting, a hard-won quest to arrive at an origin story that suits the facts rather than turns away from them.
A valuable contribution to the literature of race and its problematics.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14675-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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