.
Patton’s inspiring memoir of survival in an abusive adoptive family offers a well-informed and startling take on violence and racism in America.
At five years old, the author was adopted by a New Jersey couple who by all outward appearances were model middle-class African Americans. But the facade dropped the moment they reached their gleaming house with manicured lawn and shade trees. Patton was the prisoner of a passive father and bitter adoptive mother whose frustration at her infertility was loosed on her adoptive daughter in violent beatings and emotional abuse. From ages five to 13, the author was the victim of terrifying assaults, including beatings with an extension cord, by a woman determined to keep the child under manipulative control. Upon entering school, Patton was shocked to discover that such violence was condoned by the community, whose deeply held Pentecostal beliefs reinforced the philosophy, “spare the rod, spoil the child.” Merging her personal experiences with a provocative examination of African-American history, the author credibly argues that violence is a continuing legacy of slavery. She makes many plausible connections among the corporeal punishment of children, low self-esteem, fervent religiosity and fathers too weak to assert themselves after centuries of having their paternity denied. Patton charts her nascent awareness that the abuse she experienced was plainly not right, even though her adoptive mother’s family and friends condoned it. She ran away and was eventually placed in a group home. Despite the outrageous negligence of her guardians, who did their best to discourage her, she won a full scholarship to an elite private boarding high school. Personal discovery combines with knowledgeable historical argument to create a document at once carefully reasoned and powerfully emotional, striking in its endeavor to relate a unique individual experience to broader communal ills.
.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9310-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
PERSPECTIVES
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