More an extended whine than a paean to pluck.
After memorably describing her journey from a Puerto Rican barrio to acceptance at a prestigious New York high school in When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and Almost a Woman (1998), the author now vividly recalls the long infatuation that put her life on hold in the ’70s.
As usual, Santiago writes well, but this latest memoir at times seems labored and overly self-absorbed. Though she is still nostalgic for Puerto Rico and her family, she seems quite nonchalant about keeping in touch. She is also quick to discern ethnic prejudice, though she has vast numbers of supportive Anglo friends and ultimately benefits from affirmative action. Fundamentally, her problem is more the usual one of loving the wrong man too much. Just 21, her dancing career on hold, she decides to move to Florida with Ulvi, a much older Turkish man. She knows her action will shock her mother, who, though never married herself, hopes her daughter will wed, but Santiago is too much in love to care. Ulvi remains a cipher: he has directed or produced (Santiago never really knows) a famous Turkish movie he now wants to distribute in the US and is going to Florida to raise funds. He never gets the money in the seven years of their relationship, though he makes countless mysterious trips and phone calls. He forbids Santiago to answer the phone, and she supports him when he goes back to graduate school in Texas and New York. While he studies, Santiago works, does his research, types his papers, and writes up his notes. Though he refuses to marry her, Ulvi is insanely jealous, dictating what she should wear and whom she should befriend. Santiago increasingly feels stifled, but only begins to liberate herself when a colleague suggests she apply to Harvard. She is accepted and slowly begins to reclaim her independence.
More an extended whine than a paean to pluck.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7382-0820-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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