Graceful, respectful and achingly honest.
Novelist Nunez (Salvation City, 2010, etc.) recalls her years with her longtime friend Susan Sontag (1933–2004).
Nunez, nearly 20 years Sontag’s junior, was working at the New York Review of Books when she first met the woman with whom she would share an apartment and with whose son she would share a romantic relationship. In 1976, Sontag, recovering from breast-cancer surgery, employed Nunez to deal with the piles of correspondence that had accumulated during her illness, and their relationship quickly evolved into a friendship. Nunez mostly eschews traditional chronology for the anfractuous avenues of memory, following them wherever they take her; they take readers to some amusing, painful, difficult and illuminating places. We learn that the white streak in Sontag’s hair was her actual hair color, and the rest was dyed. She admired William Gass and Joan Didion. She bit her nails, hated teaching and rarely prepared for readings. She did not carry a purse. She was funnier than many thought. Her work habits were ferocious but erratic. She liked to read a book every day, but she had no routine or writing schedule. When she was ready to write, she worked day and night, popping pills to stay awake. She was bisexual. Psychologically, it seems, she was surprisingly fragile; she needed to be the center of attention, insisted others do what she wanted to do and felt she never received the respect or money due someone of her talents (she was very impressed with her own talents). Nunez struggles mightily to be fair, but there are times when Sontag just flat pissed her off. Sometimes, says the author, she was “a Joe Louis who wanted to hurt someone.”
Graceful, respectful and achingly honest.Pub Date: April 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-935633-22-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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