A straightforward, good-humored narration of a genuinely fascinating life, but with too many pages devoted to its mundane...
In this debut memoir, a globetrotting teacher from small-town India recounts 80 years at home and throughout Africa, against backdrops of occasional political turmoil.
Nadukkudiyil was born in what is now the southern Indian state of Kerala, in 1931, a time when his older relatives could still remember people being bought and much of the country was under British rule. During the next 20 years, Nadukkudiyil lived out a happy, colorful childhood; India struggled for independence; our narrator graduated high school and miserably attempted to work the family farm before being granted a reprieve in the form of college; colonialism ended to great jubilation but also great turbulence; and Nadukkudiyil ran away from home to make his way in the big bad city of Madras, where he was robbed, experienced life at the bottom rung of society and returned home the sheepish prodigal son. Upon graduating college, he set out to teach in first the port city of Aden (now part of Yemen), then rural Ethiopia, less-rural Ethiopia, Eritrea, and finally Nigeria, where he stayed for 25 years through a bloody coup and the Nigerian civil war. Along the way, he married and had kids. The narrator’s good cheer and upbeat outlook on life make for absorbing reading, and wonderfully vivid images appear throughout, such as a childhood memory of clearing the front yard of frogs during a monsoon or milk bottles corked with rolled-up leaves. However, the story is flattened by a lack of shaping or pacing. Too much weight is given to mundane details like the layout of a school or the bureaucratic process of applying for a job transfer, while events that should stand out in sharper relief, like the sight of an anti-Jewish massacre in Aden, are lost in the deluge of information. Numerous unfamiliar terms are used without explanation, and major events like the births of the author’s children do not receive much attention.
A straightforward, good-humored narration of a genuinely fascinating life, but with too many pages devoted to its mundane aspects.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461119203
Page Count: 563
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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