A stirring tribute to a turbulent, beautifully evoked era.
Bascom, son of missionaries, illuminates the Ethiopia of his childhood in this Bakeless Prize–winning memoir.
After arriving in Addis Ababa as a toddler, Bascom senses the teeming life that surges in the countryside surrounding the capital city. The jarring sounds, intoxicating scents and colorful sights all come alive before him like fireworks. His older brother, Johnathan, is sent off to boarding school at Bingham Academy—the main school for foreign, or ferengi, children and a place that eventually becomes integral to the author’s own experience. In the early years—with his brother absent—young Tim must find his own way. During the day, he follows native housekeeper Marta around as she goes about her chores, and he finds pleasure in watching the exotic wildlife outside his window. A chameleon becomes his personal pet, and their relationship later develops into a central theme here. Bascom, himself a chameleon of sorts, is gifted at assimilation as the scenery changes around him. Whether living in the shadow of Mount Damoto or in a Kansas prairie town, he seems to effortlessly shed the skin of his former life. In Africa, the author and his younger brother Nat dream of taking trips outside their family’s African compound to explore the countryside and smell the eucalyptus, while their father practices medicine and their mother preaches to local women and children. As the memoir progresses, Ethiopian society unfolds before him: He eats injera and wat in a gathering with the Lion of Judah himself, Emperor Haile Selassie, races his beloved horse against a mule belonging to a native missionary and takes cover in the school basement as university students riot. It is that political upheaval that finally forces the family’s return to the States. Along the way, nine-year-old Tim questions his identity as a child of two continents.
A stirring tribute to a turbulent, beautifully evoked era.Pub Date: June 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-65869-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
