A slender memoir of a Native American adoptee’s search for her true family. Melanson grew up in New York. She believed herself to be white, Jewish, and rich, a believer in ’60s idealism who had lived on an Israeli kibbutz and served in both the American and Israeli military. When she learned that she in fact had been adopted, Melanson began a long search to uncover her true identity, and the answer surprised her: she was a full-blood Navajo Indian. “At the time I was born, in 1953, and for many years afterwards,” she writes, “about one in four Indian children were taken from their homes and placed in non-Indian settings. It was done by bending and sometimes breaking the law of the land. It was done, white Americans said, ‘for the good of the child.’ “ Melanson’s story attracted considerable attention, yielding articles in the national press and a feature on ABC’s 20/20. Working with journalist Safran, Melanson has expanded what is in essence material for a magazine story into book length, with mixed results: the prose is flat, the narrative strangely without drama. Even so, there are some nice touches: a scene, for one, in which Melanson, now living on the Navajo Reservation in northeastern Arizona, recites a Hebrew prayer for peace, harmony, and success (“ ‘C’mon, God,’ I whispered, ‘make this work’ “), and some affecting moments when she encounters her siblings and learns about the lives of her parents. As a human-interest story, Melanson and Safran’s narrative is just so-so. As an inspirational story for adoptees, particularly American Indians, seeking to uncover their past, however, it has many merits.
Pub Date: Feb. 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97601-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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