Sharp attention to detail and a deliberate pace give this singular narrative history the sense of a shimmery, vanished past.
A poetic historical exploration of Japan’s immense capital city by an American-born author who moved to Japan to learn the language and was inspired by composer Yoshimura Hiroshi’s book Edo’s Bells of Time.
Living and working in Tokyo for some years as an editor for Hong Kong University Press inspired Sherman, who was born in Arkansas, to create this spiritual memoir, which weaves between personal storytelling of her time there and oral and mythical histories of the old neighborhoods of Tokyo. In the era of the shogunate, before the 16th-century missionaries brought the first clocks, Tokyo was Edo, and time was told by the tolling of bells across the city. The author presents Tokyo as a “timepiece,” with each different neighborhood representing the site of an ancient temple hosting its own singular sacred bell, delineated in Hiroshi’s work. Moving structurally from neighborhood to neighborhood, Sherman whimsically maps the city for readers, chronicling her encounters with the locals, including the owner of a small coffee shop with whom the author built a significant friendship. Sherman also explores the myths of the shogunate and illuminates the personal histories of the monks, bell-ringers, and other interesting characters she met along the way. Throughout her lyrical journey, she follows in the footsteps of Hiroshi, eschewing railroad travel in favor of tracing on foot “areas which bells could be heard, the pattern on a map looked like raindrops striking water.” The author’s own layered process mirrors the city’s complexity, nonlinearity, and frozen beauty. The bells were not always easy to find, but Sherman was determined, and she successfully brings into focus their elusive stories, which point to an appealing past in a city that has moved rapidly into the future.
Sharp attention to detail and a deliberate pace give this singular narrative history the sense of a shimmery, vanished past.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20640-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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