Another treatment of the extended Obama family that enlightens and deepens the public’s understanding of the president.
A burnished look at a difficult, ruptured childhood in Kenya by the president’s half sister, older by one year.
Unlike David Maraniss’ comprehensive biography of the president (Barack Obama: The Story, 2012), which does not sugarcoat the problematic father the president and Auma shared, this delicate, emotional work sidesteps the patriarch in order to portray a young woman deeply resentful of the sexist treatment of women in her Luo culture and determined to forge her own identity. Auma is the daughter of Barack Obama Sr.’s first wife, Kezia, who was essentially abandoned pregnant with Auma at the family compound while her husband pursued a scholarship program at the University of Hawaii. Much happened while her father went on to graduate studies in economics at Harvard, namely his marriage to Stanley Ann Dunham and the birth of Barack Obama Jr., divorce and remarriage to another young white American woman, Ruth Baker, who then followed Barack back to Nairobi and became the third wife and awkward stepmother to Auma and her older brother, Abongo. Deprived of her biological mother, Auma found in the rigors and routine of her schools a reprieve from a bleak home life that comprised an “oppressive emptiness” resulting from her father’s eventual divorce from Ruth. Her father’s demise, caused by the loss of a government finance job and debilitating car accidents (Auma blames them on political intrigue, Maraniss on his drinking), strained her relationship with him to such an extent that she did not seek his permission to travel as an exchange student in Germany. Auma became a proficient student of German, and her meeting with her brother Barack in Chicago in 1984 marks the brightest moment in this eager-to-please work. The meeting paved the way for his subsequent trips to Kenya and warmly unfolding relationship with his African family.
Another treatment of the extended Obama family that enlightens and deepens the public’s understanding of the president.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01005-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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