Gee provides interesting details on the changes in her outer world but not much depth or introspection on her inner growth.
In this coming-of-age memoir, Los Angeles–based journalist Gee examines her transformation from social-climbing material girl to loving mother after falling in love with a fellow journalist.
Born into a middle-class Chinese-American family, the author gleaned early on from her father’s losing battle with his financially obsessed brothers that material wealth paved the way to happiness. “All my life I had gotten the message that ‘making it’ meant being rich, pampered, and beautiful,” she writes. So she left the States after college to pursue her dream of “making it” as a features writer in Hong Kong, where she sparkled among the glitterati while being doted on by a British fund manager. But the trappings of that “swish, fragrant existence” began to lose their luster when the author met her husband-to-be, Ajay Singh, a “kind, handsome soulful man” who, after brief workplace encounters, wooed her from his home in India through old-fashioned correspondence. Six months after moving to Hong Kong to be with Gee and their subsequent engagement, Singh revealed that his family still lived in the childhood home built by his great-grandfather at the turn of the 20th century. Though having expressed no prior interest in meeting her future in-laws, within weeks of her fiance’s revelation, she sought to visit the “grand hundred-room” outside New Delhi. While much of the memoir’s narrative focuses on the reconciliation of contrasting worlds as Gee strove for acceptance by the Singhs, one wonders whether the capitalistic tendencies the author slowly disavowed represent the emotional truth of the period depicted here or are merely heightened for dramatic effect.
Gee provides interesting details on the changes in her outer world but not much depth or introspection on her inner growth.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-37878-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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