Blurring boundaries, Reza exercises literary license and often writes with poetic power.
A memoir of the young poet as a mother, lover, daughter, and teacher.
Though Reza and her husband met in Bangladesh, the family homeland for each, most of these chapters, poems, and fragments are rooted in their American experience. This is where they raised two sons, suffered another difficult pregnancy (the most sustained and wrenching narrative in the memoir), and saw their marriage rupture in anger and bouts of craziness. Her attempts to “turn jagged truth into art” also reflect her experiences with hospitalized veterans as they deal with their trauma and she teaches them writing and art as therapeutic tools. “Writing is what I believe in most of all, writing has saved my life,” she tells them. “Writing saves my life on a regular basis.” At the start of the book, the author explains that she and her husband lived together for 16 months after deciding to separate, a decision that seems to have been more hers than his. They eventually shared custody of their young sons, and she had to balance the time she spent with them (and her loneliness when they were apart) with her vocation of helping the soldiers and her rediscovery of herself as a woman who is sexual as well as maternal. Her relationships don’t seem to last long, for, as she writes, “When I saw myself through his eyes, I saw someone I liked….Myself, in his eyes. That’s who I kept falling in love with. Myself, in all of their eyes. And when I don’t like what I see, I find another pair of eyes.” The author writes with self-lacerating honesty, but one senses that her former husband and her sons would have different stories to tell, different perspectives, and different memories. She admits, “by the time the story travels from my life through my memory into your hands, dear reader, it will not quite be non-fiction.”
Blurring boundaries, Reza exercises literary license and often writes with poetic power.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59709-744-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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