A beautifully written memoir that offers familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political analysis.
Debut author and community organizer Prabasi reflects on a life spent in Nepal and Ethiopia and on the disconcerting political environment that she found in the United States.
When the Netherlands-born author’s family moved to Nepal, she was in the fifth grade and could speak but neither read nor write the native language. She attended an American international school in Kathmandu and later moved to the United States to attend college. While visiting Ethiopia, she fell deeply in love with its “vast expanses, its diversity of landscape and languages,” and its coffee, too, which is a prized part of the culture. There, she also met her future husband, Elias, and gave birth to her first child, but she became concerned about the country’s “controlling and authoritarian political system” and decided to move to New York City for a safer, freer life and greater opportunity. The author and her spouse wanted to start a business, so they opened Café Buunni in 2012, just over a year after they’d landed in the city. Later, Prabasi was shocked by Donald Trump’s coarse campaign for the presidency—she became an American citizen just in time to vote in the 2016 election—and she became anxious that the country where she’d made her home was quickly becoming inhospitable to immigrants and people of color. The author’s impressionistic account of her travels is poetically thoughtful, and she has a keen eye for granular detail, which she evokes in delicate, vivid language. Also, she offers an inspiring tale of community-based political action; her cafe participated in a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union, which will remind some older readers of decades past, when cafes were hotbeds of political organization. However, others may find her frenzied depiction of the United States following Trump’s election to be hyperbolic, as she describes a country that seems solely defined by its “racism, the white supremacy, the gun violence, the war economy, the individualism taken to extremes that leaves little room for empathy or compassion.”
A beautifully written memoir that offers familiar calls for political resistance but little in-depth political analysis.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73285-403-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
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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