If one person’s story can shed light on a larger history, Bird’s memoir carries many excellent lessons.
A wise, intimate memoir about growing up the son of an American foreign-service officer in the Middle East, from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bird (co-author, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 2005, etc.).
Titled after the gate between East and West Jerusalem, the story moves from the arrival of the author’s family in Jerusalem in 1956, where his father, Eugene Bird, was appointed, through his stints in Dhahran and Cairo, until the Americans were expelled by Gamal Nasser after the Naksa (“setback”) of Israel’s 1967 territorial conquest. The family spent some time in Beirut, as well, and later in Bombay, and the author studied at the American University of Beirut in the early ’70s and became an anti–Vietnam War activist. Born in 1951, Bird came of age among Arabs and Jews, and he offers unique insights into the deepening animosities that he witnessed firsthand. Although the family was thrilled to be inhabiting the Holy Land, with friends from all sectors (the father studied Arabic), they soon soured on the idea of Zionism, which they saw as the forcible seizure of much of Palestine “by threat, murder, pillage.” In Dhahran, they lived among a tightly contained colony of 2,500 Americans employed by Aramco, a company that was patronizing toward the Saudi workers and felt the “winds of Arab nationalism” in the form of strikes. While in Cairo, Bird observed how a truly cosmopolitan city gradually grew autocratic under Nasser and anti-Semitic in the wake of Israeli aggression. The author’s richly layered cultural narrative finds incisive lessons in the careers of Nasser and the Saudi royal family, the PLO hijackings of September 1970—Bird’s girlfriend was aboard one plane—and the journey of Holocaust survivors in establishing “the Hebrew Republic” of Israel.
If one person’s story can shed light on a larger history, Bird’s memoir carries many excellent lessons.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4440-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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