There’s plenty of chopsocky goodness here, but Chan also reveals a soulful, thoughtful side—just one you wouldn’t want to...
Hong Kong–born Chan (I Am Jackie Chan, 1998), action star and the world’s best-known martial artist, outlines his life story in this (mostly) amiable memoir.
“We can’t beat blockbusters like Black Panther and Wonder Woman, but they can’t beat us when it comes to kung fu films or pure action—and no one, but no one, can top my huge collection of sticking tape!” So proclaims Chan, who is nothing if not competitive, though he’s usually good-humored about it. He was born into the middling rungs of territorial Hong Kong society, his father a martial artist who worked as a chef in a consulate, which landed Chan in a school among rich kids. Chan soon learned to defend himself with his fists, which led him to a school that blended martial arts and acting—just the recipe for the career he carved out for himself, landing his first starring role not long after Bruce Lee’s death in a movie called New Fist of Fury, “a major work that would herald the arrival of a new kung fu star,” as Chan was promised. He worked his way from contract player to star, always with an eye on the bigger prize of Hollywood. On that note, the memoir begins with his being awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2016. “After fifty-six years, making over two hundred films, and breaking many bones, I never thought I’d win one,” he allows, before adding that he wouldn’t mind winning another for a film in which he starred or directed. The book is definitively warts (and cracked skulls and broken bones and gallons of blood) and all: The author confesses to all kinds of bad behavior, though he writes that his greatest regret is not having been a better student. He warmly praises friends and colleagues such as Michelle Yeoh (“not many people can match me in my willingness to go for it”), Chris Tucker, and Sylvester Stallone.
There’s plenty of chopsocky goodness here, but Chan also reveals a soulful, thoughtful side—just one you wouldn’t want to mess with.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982107-21-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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