A graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience.
A graphic memoir recounts a quiet life amid cultural upheaval.
Pingru, 95, makes his literary debut with a charming memoir illustrated with his own evocative watercolors, chronicling his life in China from 1923 to 2008, the year his beloved wife died. The son of a lawyer, the author grew up in a close-knit family that valued tradition. Throughout the year, his parents, siblings, and assorted relatives gathered to celebrate the seasons and various festivals, pay respects to ancestors and gods, and share special foods. When he was 18, he was accepted into a military academy, eager to join the fight against the Japanese. By the time World War II ended, he had risen to first lieutenant. The most significant event in his life was his marriage to Mao Meitang in 1948. Although the union was arranged by their families, the two had known each other as children and were delighted with the match. Now responsible for a wife, Pingru decided to return to civilian life, though he was unsure about his new path. He learned bookkeeping, tried—and failed—to set up a noodle shop, and settled in Shanghai, where he found two jobs, as a hospital accountant and editor. Everything changed for the worse in 1958, when, caught in the Cultural Revolution, the author was sent to do “Reeducation Through Labor” in a province far from Shanghai. Meitang and their five children were left to eke out a living without him. “The whole family was stigmatized,” he writes. The author does not dwell on the hardship of those 20 years but instead focuses on how he coped: by memorizing sentences in English to occupy his mind during “unskilled and primitive” labor; by learning to play the violin on Sunday, “a rest day”; and by trips home once a year at the Chinese New Year. “For ordinary people like us,” he writes, “life is made up of numbers of small details” that become “treasured memories.”
A graceful, gently told narrative of contentment and resilience.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87149-2
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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