Readers will be happily lost in this lively, engrossing book about home and family.
Jack’s debut collection weaves together spirited vignettes recalling his boyhood in Trinidad.
For Gabriel, Jack’s fictional stand-in, there’s no such thing as small beginnings. His recollections come from the years he lives in Toco, a small village on Trinidad, during the second world war. Toco’s remoteness prevents Gabriel from focusing too much on European scuffles, though. While raucous soldiers add an exciting new element to village life, they’re largely seen as a curiosity; there are plenty of more interesting occurrences in these far-from-bucolic island days. A mix of superstition, Caribbean Christianity and island traditions shapes Gabriel’s understanding of the world, turning seemingly normal life events into exhilarating, sometimes harrowing affairs. Zombies, ghosts, ancient village charms, the Obeah man’s visits—he’s a kind of witch doctor—and charismatic priests imbue these stories with an entrancing flavor, while hardscrabble daily requirements, from fetching river water to curing meat for dinner, aren’t described as burdensome tasks but spirit endeavors. Undaunted by daily challenges, he maintains innocence and hopefulness, both of which enable him to make declarations and list dreams bound to awaken nostalgia. There are other mountains to climb, hummingbirds to snatch out of midair, lighthouses to ascend and girls to charm. Readers will enjoy watching Gabriel grow into a young man, and when a rupture in family life forces him to leave Toco behind, readers may find themselves sharing in his dismay. Jack, a skillful writer, capably relates island parlance while injecting his tales with affecting color and passion, not to mention a few black-and-white illustrations. Most of the stories successfully fit together, and Jack’s proclaimed goal to relate what life was like in rural Trinidad in the ’30s and ’40s has been achieved.
Readers will be happily lost in this lively, engrossing book about home and family.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479731640
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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