Vivid testimony to faith and the human spirit amidst chaos and daunting change.
A Vietnamese refugee movingly recalls her life during wartime, her escape, and her sometimes bumpy adjustment to life in the US.
Nineteen when she and her family managed to get on one of the last helicopters taking off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon in 1975, Sawyer first explains how the family came to be Christian in a narrative crafted by veteran coauthor Proctor (Sally, 1990, etc.). Anh’s grandfather had been a bureaucrat employed by the French colonial government in Hanoi. Unhappy with his work and his wife, he became addicted to opium; saved by an American missionary, he converted to Christianity and dedicated his life to God. Her father, the son of a prominent landlord, became a communist and was imprisoned by the French; after the communists took over in North Vietnam, he got into trouble with the Party, and the family had to flee to Saigon. As communists advanced from the north, an elder brother who lived in America tried but failed to get them exit visas, and they joined the mob of panicked Vietnamese on the embassy grounds. In the US, religious organizations found the family homes, work, and a college for Anh in the Midwest. There she fell in love with fellow student Philip Sawyer, an aspiring fashion designer who seemed refreshingly different from everyone else. They married and moved to New York, but while Anh thrived working for an airline, Philip was unable to succeed in his chosen field and became depressed. Her religious faith wavered until they moved to Kansas, where Philip’s depression was cured by a speaker at a prayer meeting. In the late 1990s, Anh began working with Vietnamese relief groups, and she recalls a visit to Vietnam in 1998 that allowed her to come to comforting closure with her past.
Vivid testimony to faith and the human spirit amidst chaos and daunting change.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-52908-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
