A pleasant success story.
In this debut memoir, a black Air Force veteran recounts his unlikely rise from rural poverty to the upper middle class.
Born in the Arkansas Delta in 1943, Strother was the seventh child of poor parents. His mother worked various manual jobs, including picking cotton for local farmers; his father was the secretary and treasurer of his church. When the author was born, most of his neighbors over 40 couldn’t read or write and young people frequently moved to the North to find better employment opportunities. Strother was no different: “Even though I loved the people in my community, I disliked intensely almost everything about where I grew up. I always felt out-of-place.” As soon as he graduated from high school, he rushed to join the Air Force like his older brother Curtis. Experiencing racism from whites in the South while he was wearing his Air Force uniform—proof that he was willing to fight and die for the United States—brought home the discrimination that Strother would face throughout his life. But the Air Force provided him the opportunity to live abroad in West Germany, where, removed from the American dynamics of black and white, he was able to experience something closer to racial equality. After marrying a German woman and moving with her to Detroit, Strother did not let the expectations of others hold him back from pursuing the American dream. In his book, which features some family photographs, the author recounts attending night school to become a computer programmer, getting a job with a major corporation, working his way up to salesman and then district manager, and investing in real estate. Strother skillfully summons his memories using a simple, direct prose: “When Papa went to the bank to withdraw his money, it was closed and out of business. After that, he started to keep his money in Prince Albert tobacco containers, which he would bury around his house.” There’s a soothing rhythm to the narration, though it tends to ramble unpredictably. While Strother led an accomplished life, the achievements were not flashy ones, and he does not imbue them with much excitement. The author seems to intend for this to be an inspirational memoir, but readers will likely end up not feeling much emotion beyond a satisfaction that Strother’s life worked out nicely.
A pleasant success story.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4791-3902-6
Page Count: 259
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2018
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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