A memoir steeped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving.
A memoir of the difficult lives of the author’s family members, who eked out a bare subsistence during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Out of a sense of guilt toward his relatives, who toiled raising young families during the revolution and endured no end of hardship in their poor village, Yan (The Day the Sun Died, 2018, etc.), a winner of the Franz Kafka Prize, addresses the rarely acknowledged sacrifices they made as well as how their lives inspired him and his generation to leave their rural homes and try to find greater opportunity in the city. Yan was the youngest in a big family growing up in Henan Province, breaking up “ginger stones” alongside his beloved father to fashion the tile-roofed house that would serve as his brothers’ bridal “mansions.” The author barely got a middle school education. With a sick sister whose care required all of the family’s earnings, there was nothing but toil and poverty, and Yan watched his father grow increasingly frail from chronic asthma. All the while, he dreamed of leaving and becoming a writer, and he followed his father’s brother to work in the city at a cement factory. His experiences in the city, Yan was sure, would make for a happy life, and he set about writing after his long shifts at the factory. Eventually, the author joined the army to get away from the poverty and monotony that his relatives endured. Throughout the book, Yan depicts his provincial relatives with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death. “The elderly have no choice but to take a first step on behalf of the next generation,” he writes. “Then they go to the next world and lie down there, calmly waiting for their children to follow in their footsteps and be reunited with them.”
A memoir steeped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4808-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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