Hong Kong action star Chan tells his story to journalist Yang (Eastern Standard Time, not reviewed), and a colorful rags-to-riches tale it is. Chan is best-known as a man who does all his own stunts, no matter how insanely dangerous or harrowing, a genuinely likeable Everyman figure who is summed up by the title of his most recent American release: Mr. Nice Guy. Although he is a master of kung fu, his film persona is that of the ordinary guy who feels pain, who loses fights occasionally, and who survives by his wits and agility rather than superhuman strength. Delightfully enough, that is the same personality that emerges from this surprisingly artful as-told-to. Chan focuses on his childhood and early career struggles for most of the book, only reaching his present level of stardom (he’s the biggest box-office draw in Asia, and rapidly approaching similar status everywhere else) in the last 75 pages. His childhood story is offbeat, perhaps well known to his fans but a glimpse into a very different world for everyone else. When he was seven, his parents handed him over to the China Drama Academy, where he ate, slept, and lived for ten years, studying the arts of the Chinese opera under Dickensian conditions. Chan recounts this story of 12-hour days, beatings, and other punishments with a finely judged sense of right and wrong, without a grandstanding sense of outrage, and with considerable humor. The rest of his story is told with appealing modesty as well. The book concludes with a very detailed filmography and lists of his ten most dangerous stunts and favorite fight scenes. An entertaining tale, well enough told that it should be of interest even to those who have never seen a Jackie Chan film, if any such people still exist. (8 pages color, 16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-41503-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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