Using a series of brief, fragmented descriptions, Agos°n (who edited What Is Secret: Stories by Chilean Women, 1996, and other volumes) reconstructs the wanderings and difficulties of her family Agos°n’s grandparents, a tailor and a cigarette-roller, began their travels at the beginning of this century when they fled Russia for Istanbul to escape anti-Jewish pogroms. From Istanbul, they moved with their children to Marseilles in France, where Agos°n’s father was born, before sailing to Chile, where they hoped to escape poverty with the help of a relative who ran a successful business in Valparaiso. Once in Chile, the family settled in Quillota; they were the only Jewish family in the small town. Despite their attempts to assimilate (Agos°n’s grandfather gave up speaking Russian and her grandmother would only light the Sabbath candles after all the windows in the house had been covered with wrapping paper), Agos°n’s father MoisÇs was always considered an outsider. Excluded from the private schools of the upper and middle classes, MoisÇs went to the public school and eventually left Quillota to study medicine. But even as a university doctor in Santiago, MoisÇs continued to encounter anti-Semitism. In 1968, student protests and slanderous newspaper articles forced him to close his prestigious research labs. Shortly thereafter, he moved his family to Athens, Ga., never to return to Chile. Though Agos°n’s complicated family history is a worthy subject for a memoir, her melodramatic, overly sentimentalized writing robs the story of its power. Agos°n continually casts her family as saints in a sinning world—apparently they never fought, never had a character flaw. The result is that, though the prejudice her family encountered was deplorable and undeserved, Agos°n’s black-and-white portrayal makes the history of their difficulties ring hollow, the stuff of allegories and fairy tales, not real life. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55861-195-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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