Confucius finally gets his due. Chin sticks to the facts as she can discern them and lets the master speak for himself.
A wonderfully streamlined, agenda-free biography of China’s greatest intellectual.
Chin (Four Sisters of Hofei, 2002, etc.) corrects centuries of misquoting, projection, over-analysis and general wrongheadedness about the words and thoughts of Confucius (551–479 BCE). Exerting to this day an indescribable influence on China, he is so intertwined with its state and society that it seems impossible to see the man anymore, much less understand what he was trying to say. “We give him credit for all that has gone right and wrong in China because we do not really know him,” Chin writes. Few facts are available about his life, and the gaps have often, at times fancifully, been filled by disciples writing centuries later. Chin eschews this temptation, concentrating instead on what is known—or what she at least thinks she knows—about his life and teachings. Born as a common gentleman—meaning that he could be educated but otherwise would have to make his own way in the world—Confucius seems to have spent a good deal of his life in service to various courts. He moved frequently, not always for clear reasons, and often had around him a group of students willing to act as foils for his philosophical wit. A true scholar, Confucius had a few core beliefs but no overarching set of ideas to which he tried to force all situations to bend. (Chin approves.) Revered for his wisdom and humility, he nevertheless had a pragmatic side: “I have never refused to teach anyone who approaches me on his own with a bundle of dried meat.”
Confucius finally gets his due. Chin sticks to the facts as she can discern them and lets the master speak for himself.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-4618-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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