A weighty, captivating look at a caregiver who deals with death, mental illness, and the struggles of refugees in America.
In this memoir, a caregiver relates the stories of the myriad people in her life she has helped, including her husband, mother, and an African family.
Years after their relationship began in secret, Larkin’s (Resettled, 2016) colleague Ron proposed to her. Soon after, they would find themselves moving to Boise, Idaho, “to make a fresh start”—in a city that seemingly wouldn’t hold many surprises but where the author quickly found herself caught up in the plight of the Bantu people. A persecuted ethnic minority from Somalia seeking asylum in the United States, the Bantu were brought to Boise in an effort to disperse refugee populations outside the major cities. Coincidentally, Larkin had studied the Bantu in school. She soon found herself helping and befriending young mother Fatuma; her ill husband, Yusuf; and their three children. The author helped Fatuma’s family to navigate mental illness, cancer, and a rebellious older son—finding the familial connection she sometimes lacked from her standoffish stepchildren. “Fatuma and I were so different,” Larkin writes, “but certain tragedies continued to bind us together.” With the discovery that Ron had glioblastoma multiforme, the author suddenly encountered a maze of fear and bureaucracy that would eventually lead her to lose the love of her life. She then started over yet again by leaving for Seattle to care for her elderly mother. The author skillfully shows how these events led her to experience many of Fatuma’s feelings of alienation and strain without ever leaving her own country. In its opening chapters, Larkin’s book explores the familiar tropes of a Westerner trying to reconcile immigrant experiences and foreign cultures with a suburban lifestyle that suddenly seems lavish. At one point, the author returned home and realized her garage was bigger than Fatuma’s apartment. But soon Larkin settles into a much more intriguing and substantial meditation on caregivers. Without ever boasting or lamenting, the author manages to perfectly capture both the joys and the immense psychological toll of constantly helping others, becoming an inspiring survivor herself in the process.
A weighty, captivating look at a caregiver who deals with death, mental illness, and the struggles of refugees in America.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976983-0-5
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Ahadi Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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