Images and emotions indistinct and unresolved, presented as if glimpsed from a seat in a passing train. Even when they burn,...
Free-floating memories of a Viennese Jewish childhood and flight from the Anschluss, roughly stitched together in a strappingly formal voice and counterpointed by Abish’s later visit to Austria.
Readers are brought directly into the custard of novelist Abish’s (Eclipse Fever, 1993, etc.) fraught youth and pummeled with runaway questions: “What, then, did I find so disquieting? Was it the logic that dictated their shared agenda? The practical motives?” Disquiet for sure, as Abish rolls in ambiguity, indeterminacy, and equivocation like a dog in something long dead. “Was this, I wonder, my very first awareness of self-deception?” he asks when considering his family’s poor excuse for a Christmas tree in his youth. Upon returning to his childhood home years later, he “experienced a satisfaction at feeling so indifferent. It was just another house!” Surely his flight from the Nazis was a scary event, but Abish chronicles it as a series of glancing encounters: the night his family was told to leave their home in one hour’s time; his game of catch with the ghetto’s administrator, “a maniacal individual whose actions frequently bordered on unbridled lunacy.” This approach can be frustratingly elliptical, but there are some remarkably sharp isolated tableaux. Forget the evocations, look at the shadows being thrown: surviving inmates from death camps, “marched by maniacal guards . . . across the devastated landscape of Poland,” or the author’s grim realization that as an Austrian Jew he is the enemy in Israel. Anselm Kiefer provides a loophole into an episode of self-recognition for Abish, as does a tightly knit synagogue community, a mnemonic center of gravity “swaying in prayer, their voices pitched high, filling the air with such acute urgency, such passion that for once I, by heart a skeptic, a doubter, felt my resistance fade.”
Images and emotions indistinct and unresolved, presented as if glimpsed from a seat in a passing train. Even when they burn, Abish provides a protective distance.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-679-41868-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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