The richness of Masumoto’s earlier memoir (Epitaph for a Peach, 1995) about life as a Japanese-American farmer in California is generally lacking here. The problem: Masumoto never quite settles on a subject or direction. Instead, the narrator ventures all over the place, ranging from a discourse on raisins to an evocation of the community “hall,” and from his “chairmanship” of a neighbor’s funeral to the joys of sweating. Some of it’s interesting; the writing is often quite good, even if disconnected or chronologically challenging. Located in Del Rey in California’s Central Valley, the author’s 80-acre farm—20 acres for peaches, 60 for grapes—was purchased by his father rather inexpensively because fully a fourth of it was considered worthless. Covered in “hardpan,” a layer of clay and minerals hardened into rock, the property was cleared over a period of years, “and now lush green vines grow,” producing as much as two tons of raisins per acre. As Masumoto prunes his grapevines, he thinks of his jiichan, his grandfather Masumoto, who arrived in California 100 years ago to work in a vineyard, though he’d never seen a grape. The author traveled to Japan after his college days at Berkeley to study and work with distant relatives, most of whom scarcely knew his family. Then he resumed working with his father on the farm, enjoying the daily grind. As in his first book, Masumoto writes wonderfully of his crops and the challenges of keeping a small farm going. If it had been presented as a collection of vignettes or essays, this might have summoned up more literary or personal energy. But ill-arranged slices of life do not a memoir make. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04673-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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