A striking, sensitive record of voyages and acceptance.
A California native recalls coming-of-age in the 1960s, the deaths of her parents and her Muslim ex-husband, and many travels in this debut memoir.
Baldwin was born into privilege, the daughter of a handsome, well-known architect with a showpiece home in a Southern California beach community. She details how this idyllic existence soon disintegrated, however, in part due to her father’s drinking and infidelity. She and her sister then lived with their mother in Palm Springs but also regularly visited their bon vivant father, remarried to another heavy drinker with her own children. Baldwin’s stepsister committed suicide, a shocking event that contributed to Baldwin’s entering an early marriage with the son of a wealthy family. The young couple hit the road in a Volkswagen Bus, delving into psychedelic drugs and other 1960s happenings in Haight-Ashbury, Guadalajara, and elsewhere. The marriage eventually dissolved, leaving Baldwin to raise her son alone. At this halfway point of the memoir, Baldwin skips ahead 40 years and writes about the deaths of her parents and her ex, rewinding to previous events in between, including when Baldwin moved to Mexico. She stayed in touch with her ex while continuing to live an itinerant existence, including in Morocco, and ultimately converted to Islam. Baldwin remembers her stepsister again near the end of her memoir, as well as others she lost, noting, “And in the imaginary landscape of memory and projection, all the ghosts dance free.” Baldwin’s beautifully observed memoir captures the early 1960s spirit: “we were the nation’s children, swallowing power chemicals to discover ancient roots. We crawled from the sea as single-celled organisms and witnessed the birth of complexity.” She also provides touching tableaux of dealing with death and accepting the flaws of loved ones. This impressionistic memoir skims over some potentially interesting subjects, with little detail provided about Baldwin’s second marriage or her financial situation, which apparently allowed for continued travels around the world. Overall, however, it’s an evocative, memorable memoir.
A striking, sensitive record of voyages and acceptance.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63152-822-4
Page Count: 314
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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