Novelist Dorfman’s (Konfidenz, 1995, etc.) memoir shakes up the term Latino, as he plots the course of “a hybrid, part Yankee, part Chilean, a pinch Jew, a mestizo in search of a center,” who becomes an outspoken Chilean exile campaigning for the self-determination of the Americas. Dorfman’s family history is driven by exile. His Eastern European grandparents fled pogroms and Nazi persecution and met in Argentina, where a young Ariel was born and lived until his father was forced to leave for the US after protesting the political purge of an Argentine university. Ariel became a staunch Yankee, rejecting the language of his immigrant parents, until his father became a victim of McCarthyism and was forced to leave the US for Chile. There Ariel spent his high school years reading imported comics and dreaming of returning to New York. But at 18 he was swept up in the anti-US sentiments of the Latin American left in the early 1960s, and decided to stay, becoming a Chilean citizen in order to get involved in a democratic-based political revolution. When Salvador Allende became president in 1970, Dorfman took a government post as a literary trailblazer for the people. He oversaw a campaign to translate international classics into Spanish and publish them cheaply, and co-authored a popular polemic on US cultural imperialism. Yet it is not until the coup that ousted Allende, that Ariel felt a true bond with Chile’s poor, as he went into hiding to escape the widespread arrests and torture of Allende supporters. Alternating between Chilean political events in the early 1970s and his own life story, Dorfman (who now lives in North Carolina and teaches at Duke University) reflects on the failure of Allende’s socialist experiment, which he ties to his own destructive propensity to put people in the enemy camp. Still, Dorfman’s account is slow going through the first half but picks up greatly once the dangers he faced become clear, and he has sharp insights into Chile’s political situation.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-16862-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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