At times trite and a tad portentous, the writing nonetheless reveals two sincere souls.
A Latino teenager and an old woman wrestle with angels and demons during a four-year friendship at the nursing home where she lives and he works.
There is poignancy and pain in this account by Kleinfield, a prize-winning reporter for the New York Times who observed firsthand a friendship he calls unlikely. The woman, nonagenarian Margaret Oliver, was a dressmaker and opera fan before she arrived at the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged. The young man, Elvis Checo, was a hip-hop fan from the Dominican Republic who’d found a job helping out at the home: pushing wheelchairs, talking with residents. Kleinfield obtained their permission to follow them around—in and out of the facility—and so this simple story emerged. There are no real high, lows, climaxes or conundrums. (Margaret does not die; Elvis does not subsequently go off to study geriatric medicine at Harvard.) Instead, the volume has the feel of a photo album with accompanying captions. We see Margaret in her room sharing jokes with Elvis and giving him gentle advice (have a plan in life, look out for number one). The two discuss Republicans (both hate the GOP) and rap music; Elvis tries to explain to her what a cell phone is. We also venture out into the mean streets with Elvis. He fathers a daughter with a woman he does not love (Margaret advises him to keep his distance from the mother); he visits his brother’s barber shop; he tries college; he hangs out with friends; he watches many cartoons; he writes dreadful rap lyrics, one of which he performs for Margaret, who asks: “You thought all that up yourself?” He battles a bad back, lassitude, stereotype.
At times trite and a tad portentous, the writing nonetheless reveals two sincere souls.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7580-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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