An excellent memoir. Sayrafiezadeh is a writer to watch.
The poignant, brilliantly told story of a unique and troubled childhood.
Granta and Paris Review contributor Sayrafiezadeh writes captivatingly of his strange, lonely upbringing as the child of radical socialists in 1970s New York. His Iranian-born father, who abandoned the family when the author was an infant, and American-Jewish mother fervently believed that the United States would soon be transformed by a bloody revolution, and both worked tirelessly for the Socialist Workers Party to bring about that revolution. Sayrafiezadeh writes of dreamlike days standing on street corners with his mother as she tried to sell copies of the party newspaper, The Militant. He grew up in grinding poverty, not because his parents had no choice—both were highly educated—but because of their dogmatic anti-capitalist views. For their young son, the vow of poverty meant personal deprivation and, often, bitterness. Sayrafiezadeh movingly relates his consuming craving as a preschooler for grapes, forbidden in his household because of a boycott supporting a migrant workers’ strike. Some of his stories are almost surreal. When he asked his mother to buy him a skateboard, she replied, “Once the revolution comes, everyone will have a skateboard, because all skateboards will be free.” One night when she had a meeting to attend, she left her four-year-old son home with a “comrade” she had met only two days earlier who sexually abused the boy. Later chapters detail the author’s difficult relationship with his colorful but standoffish father, whom he got to know only when he was nearly an adult, as well as the prejudices he faced as an Iranian-American during the hostage crisis of 1979–’80. An enormously talented writer, Sayrafiezadeh ably conveys a complex blend of affection and anger toward his deeply flawed parents in deftly controlled prose.
An excellent memoir. Sayrafiezadeh is a writer to watch.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34068-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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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