Brent's riveting memoirs of his odyssey through memorable times, from a Louisiana sharecropper's shack to exile in Cuba. In June 1969, Brent hijacked a TWA airliner en route from Oakland to New York City and diverted it to Cuba. Appropriately, this event comes almost precisely midpoint in Brent's memoirs, because there are two virtually distinct life stories here. In the first, Brent talks about growing up in poverty in bad neighborhoods where the lure of the street and his own rebellious inclinations led him from school to a life of drugs, drink, and petty crimes; to jail; to a political awakening as a Black Panther; and finally, to a violent shootout with the police. The post-hijacking story is about Brent's life in Cuba, where he fled after the shootout. Brent spent nearly two years in jail as a suspected American agent (falsely accused, he alleges, by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver) before finally being released to a villa full of fellow hijackers and non-Cuban would-be revolutionaries. Unlike most of his fellow expatriates, Brent slowly integrated himself into Cuban life; now 65, he lives in retirement in Havana. Both stories are told so dispassionately that they could almost have been written by a journalist tapping into Brent's memories, but the narrative's spareness does nothing to detract from its power or fascination. With remarkably little cant, rhetoric, or bitterness, and with a fair amount of criticism of both himself and his revolutionary colleagues, Brent offers an everyman's inside view of growing up poor in black America, of the Black Panthers, and of Cuba. Brent's story reads like a novel concocted to take readers inside the mind of a black revolutionary and revolutionary Cuba; that it is true makes it an important chronicle of our times.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8129-2486-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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