A searingly honest coming-of-age memoir.
A writer and motivational speaker’s account of how she learned to embrace complex truths about her biracial ancestry that her dysfunctional family had kept hidden.
As a child, Maui native Abrams believed that her mother, Daisy, was Chinese and her father, George, was a white American. Both parents, who had come together for reasons of “desperation and addiction,” had told their daughter that her brown skin and curly hair were proof that she was Hawaiian. Their unstable union ended when Abrams was just 5 and George forced his unfaithful, alcoholic wife to leave. Growing up among white family members and in mostly white neighborhoods in California and Florida, Abrams always felt out of place. She finally learned the truth—that she had been the product of Daisy's premarital liaison with a black pilot—just before she turned 14. From that moment on, Abrams openly rebelled against her father's “oppressive regime” and binged on drugs, food, sex, and especially alcohol. At 18, she left Florida for New York to become a model. The city became a multiracial haven where she learned to love the blackness that she had negated. But alcoholism, bulimia, and a volatile temperament derailed her career aspirations and tore her personal life apart, as did two unexpected pregnancies by two different men who abused her. Despite the many complications she faced—a brief, but ultimately unhappy reunion with her Chinese mother, rejection by her Chinese relatives, and the tragic heroin-induced death of her sister—motherhood became the author’s salvation. “It was my love for them that forced me through circumstances that, had I been alone, would have caused me to give up on life,” she writes. Her ability to own her identity as a biracial woman with a troubled past is the greatest strength of this compelling narrative. Her book affirms that while personal history cannot be rewritten, an individual can always become “the author of [his or her] life.”
A searingly honest coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8846-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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