A provocative and sure-to-be-controversial portrayal of repentance through art.
How a death row inmate acquired solace and inner penance through education and art.
Currently serving a death sentence at San Quentin State Prison, Noguera writes candidly and unrelentingly about his abusive childhood and his irreversible brushes with trouble as a youth. The bulk of the book details the vicious, unpredictable culture, survival tactics, and tangled hierarchy within the prison where he has spent the past 34 years. Through his fascinating and frequently shocking jailhouse memoir of San Quentin life (with its ironically coveted “million-dollar view of San Francisco”), readers will learn the art of “keistering,” the hazards of integrated prison yards and segregated gang affiliations, and how books on distinguished poets, artists, and philosophers at the prison library awakened in the author the “passion, love, hate, fury, and all of the human emotions that would later be the basis for my own work.” Noguera discusses his past as a primal, animalistic young man who became a targeted prisoner in Orange County Jail and his present struggles reconciling a dark, inescapable fate with the production of painted artwork, his “vehicle of escape” (liberally displayed throughout the book), offering a creative outlet for his frustration and inner angst. The author’s reflections focus primarily on his time in jail, leavened with guidepost life principles that he learned and adopted while behind bars. In the final chapters of the book he shares the intimate details of the vengeful 1983 homicide of his then-girlfriend’s abusive mother when he was 18. This event’s description is as lucid as the passionate tone Noguera adopts when describing his ongoing efforts of atonement, including the formation of a charitable foundation that donates art sale proceeds and remote speaking engagements on professional ethics and corporate responsibility. The author’s obvious remorse and firm commitment to self-rehabilitation are honorable and very much apparent throughout a moody, divergent memoir in which his impressive artistic oeuvre invariably wrestles with a murderous past and an irreversible death sentence.
A provocative and sure-to-be-controversial portrayal of repentance through art.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60980-797-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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
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
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