The conceit of the letter and the oddly intimate tone toward “Jimmy” make this a curious work, but it’s often insightful and...
A celebration of James Baldwin’s literature and legacy published in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of his death.
Written as an open letter to the late author and initially published in France in 2007, this book has been classified by the publisher as “literary memoir,” but it functions more as an elliptical biography. Like his literary idol, Mabanckou (French Literature/UCLA; Broken Glass, 2010, etc.) is an émigré to Paris and has spent plenty of time in the United States. But since he is an African, he brings a different perspective to themes of literary exile, race relations and the African diaspora than have Baldwin’s biographers (whom he cites liberally). He’s particularly incisive on the relationship between Baldwin and the stepfather who was much older than his mother, as Baldwin wrestled with issues of identity from childhood. His stepfather hated “white demons” and their culture with a virulence that the boy didn’t share and also instilled a harsh religiosity that his stepson would also reject. Yet James was himself “preaching from the age of fourteen,” and it was there that he became “aware of the power of the word,” with the biblical resonance that would inform so much of Baldwin’s work. Moving to France and openly acknowledging his homosexuality reinforced Baldwin’s sense of otherness, and he rebelled against such literary patriarchs as Richard Wright. “[I]dols are created in order to be destroyed,” he wrote of his rift with Wright. He also found himself at odds with the Black Power militants of the 1960s, with Eldridge Cleaver condemning him for “the most agonizing, complete hatred for Blacks.” Yet the novelist’s influence endures, and his imprint is even stronger in France, writes Mabanckou, who declares, “[i]f you return to this world, Jimmy, you will judge your homeland even more severely than you did when you were alive.”
The conceit of the letter and the oddly intimate tone toward “Jimmy” make this a curious work, but it’s often insightful and illuminating.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1593766016
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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