Undistinguished as memoir or reportage but still of some interest for the unusual circumstances surrounding it.
A ride along the Devil’s Highway—in a nicely air-conditioned sedan.
There was a time, it seems, when if Mexico were to pay for the wall of Donald Trump’s dreams, the government might have approached the Arce family for a loan. Though not in the Carlos Slim category, the author’s mother, for instance, “was responsible for putting Taxco silver on the map all over the United States.” Small wonder, perhaps, that Arce grew up with an entrepreneurial spirit. That spirit alone was not enough to secure her a berth on the lumbering ship that is America; the dramatic heart of the book is a series of episodes when, having landed a very high-powered, very remunerative gig on Wall Street, Arce suffers panic attacks while waiting for the day when her fellow suits, to say nothing of la Migra, discover that she doesn’t have a green card. “I tried to blend in as much as I could,” she writes, “and in the process I lost so much of myself, of my culture, of my Mexican-ness. In that regard, I am a recovering American elitist.” Arce writes from an unusual position; we have plenty of chronicles of crossings by campesinos but none by a country clubber. The author’s travails and turmoils eventually resulted in her leaving Wall Street, two years after getting her papers, to work for immigrant rights (“God—use me,” she implores in an overwrought moment, a tone that, sadly, isn’t an exception). They also resulted in this book, which, though doubtless well-intended, doesn’t pack a lot of punch: “The plight of undocumented immigrants in this country is currently a hot topic again,” she rightly notes, but her engagement is too narrowly circumscribed to speak much to the experiences of the less privileged.
Undistinguished as memoir or reportage but still of some interest for the unusual circumstances surrounding it.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4024-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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