A loving, urgent memorial to people now “deep in the jumble of some ossuary” who might otherwise be forgotten in time.
A profoundly affecting memoir of a mother lost to ethnic violence.
Mukasonga (Cockroaches, 2016, etc.) left her birth country of Rwanda to work in France before the genocide began, but she was well familiar with the events preceding it. As a child, she recounts, her mother informed her that her duty was to cover her body with a colorful pagne when she died: “No one must see a mother’s corpse,” she said portentously. “Otherwise it will follow you, it will chase you…it will haunt you until it’s your turn to die, when you too will need someone to cover your body.” When she was still young, Mukasonga and her family were herded off to an inhospitable region where, she imagines, the Hutu rulers hoped that “the Tutsis of Nyamata would gradually be wiped out by sleeping sickness and famine.” Instead, long before the genocide began, they were steadily victimized: beaten, raped, looted, murdered. The author’s mother, a reader of signs and omens, held drills so that her children could escape: “And so we knew exactly how to scurry into the brambles, how to dive under the dried grasses.” Mukasonga’s account of village life can be charming, as when she writes of the importance of growing sorghum for, among other reasons, making a mild beer that served as a social bond. But then it can become harrowing on the same page, as when she considers whether a man can truly be a man if robbed of his cattle, a visible sign of wealth and status. Finally, in the spasm of civil war and genocide that swept across Rwanda in the early 1990s, her mother and dozens of other family members were killed. The author closes with a haunting vision in which the ghost of a friend asks her whether she has brought "a pagne big enough to cover them all, every one of them.”
A loving, urgent memorial to people now “deep in the jumble of some ossuary” who might otherwise be forgotten in time.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-939810-04-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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