Elicits smiles for the author’s self-awareness—and winces for his lack of it.
A translator of Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, documentary filmmaker, writer and academic summarizes and assesses his peripatetic life.
Beginning with his departure from Tucson, Ariz., to enter Harvard University in the late 1950s and ending with his ascent last year of Takao Mountain, Nathan (Japanese Cultural Studies/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Japan Unbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Pride and Purpose, 2004, etc.) is not always a likable narrator. He can be charming and self-deprecating: He tells delightful stories about his failures in Hollywood, including some humiliating encounters with producer Irwin Allen and an ominous one with O.J. Simpson, whose “savage power under tenuous control” Nathan noted. He can also, perhaps intentionally, reveal a porcine profile. He writes about his pricey homes, his large salaries and royalties for various projects (including commercials for AT&T), his youthful boorishness in Japanese bars, his situational ethics and his inappropriate relationships with young female students early in his career. He charts the courses of two marriages and describes the difficulties of long separations from his wife and children mandated by his various professional projects. Nathan also reveals an ego in need of trimming. He felt insufficiently celebrated at Oe’s Nobel ceremony; he faults an associate for the financial failure of a film business; he delights in quoting flattering letters and comments, especially from celebrities; he wonders if translation is an art, too. Despite all these disagreeable qualities, his memoir contains numerous pleasurable passages. The accounts of his ongoing struggles to understand the Japanese, his amusing description of a softball game with Saul Bellow (who comes off as even more boorish than Nathan) and his misery and self-flagellation after the dissolution of his first marriage reveal a capacious heart and mind concealed beneath a carapace of crassness and self-regard.
Elicits smiles for the author’s self-awareness—and winces for his lack of it.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5345-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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