A poignant though too brief memoir by a prominent Native American author of young-adult fiction. Sneve (The Sioux, 1993, etc.) offers vignettes from the lives of her female ancestors. Flora Driving Hawk, whom the author knew as ``Unci,'' was small in size but nevertheless a strong-willed and determined woman. An Indian and a devout Christian, she was equally comfortable telling her children and grandchildren stories from her tribe's oral tradition and humming her favorite hymns. She was the granddaughter of High Bear, a chief who fought Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. ``Kunsi,'' Sneve's great-grandmother, was a Ponca who married into the Sioux nation and became conversant with the traditions of each tribe. Her husband, a Santee Sioux, was exiled from his native Minnesota to South Dakota in the aftermath of the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862. Sneve relates this story, and many others from the history of the Ponca and the Sioux, in a stream-of-consciousness manner that reflects the style of Native American storytelling. Many myths from the oral tradition are included, among them the tale of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who gave the Sioux their sacred pipe. The author also gives details of the tribes' folkways: food, the role of women, the winter count by which they kept track of the years. Interwoven with the portraits of these remarkable women and their people is the biography of Sneve herself, who used information gathered from them as source material for many of her books. She completes the family circle by closing with the stories of her mother, who grew up on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and of her own life. A genealogical table clarifies the relationships, and historical family photographs add to the book's intimacy. A heartfelt account of Indian history and tradition by a masterful storyteller.
Pub Date: May 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-8032-4226-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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