A sympathetic portrait of South Asians who are neither crazy and rich nor humorless nerds.
A New York Times reporter and stand-up comedian travels to India, looking for clues to his immigrant parents’ lives, and finds lighter moments amid dark family secrets.
Growing up Hindu in suburban New Jersey, debut author Deb learned that Indian weddings were multiday events, “a slightly tamer version of Burning Man.” When his best friend decided to get married in India, the author decided to make his first visit to the country to which his father had returned after his parents’ divorce. Deb hoped to find answers to long-simmering questions: Why was his mother so unhappy? What made his parents’ arranged marriage a disaster when an aunt and uncle’s had thrived? Why had his father abruptly gone back to India, without explaining why? Accompanied by his American girlfriend, Deb embarked on a five-city tour that began at his father’s flat in a neighborhood he calls “the Brooklyn of Kolkata.” Over the next three weeks, as he visited relatives and monuments, skeletons tumbled out of a family closet that the author breezily inventories. He chronicles his years as a “self-loathing Bengali child” in largely white suburbs, his discovery that stand-up comedy could be “cathartic,” and his former work as a CBS News reporter covering the Trump campaign. In the foreword, Hasan Minhaj rightly says that Deb “goes well beyond the typical, ‘Hey, my parents wanted me to get straight A’s’ model minority narrative.” As the author discusses his travel from Kolkata to Agra and beyond, the book often resembles a rougher-around-the-edges version of a Bill Bryson travelogue, featuring a wisecracking tone that sometimes turns sophomoric. (Deb’s first reaction to the Taj Mahal: “Holy shit. It’s right there. Holy shit. It’s right there. IT’S RIGHT THERE.”) Memoirs by children of immigrants often fault clueless parents; this one is refreshing for Deb’s realization that—whatever his elders’ missteps—he needed “to take some responsibility for my part in our family’s disconnect” for things to change.
A sympathetic portrait of South Asians who are neither crazy and rich nor humorless nerds.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293676-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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