A bold work that underscores Rinpoche’s cultural and political—rather than spiritual—journey.
In a polished, occasionally stuffy autobiography, the revered abbot of the Kumbum monastery in Tibet recounts his trials under the Chinese Cultural Revolution and recent exile to America.
In 1998, the author, who has been recognized since age two as the eighth reincarnation of Arjia Rinpoche (“precious father”), secretly flew to the West because he had grown tired of “constantly navigating the treacherous shoals of Communist policy as it affected so many Tibetans.” A new round of Chinese repression, including being forced to denounce the Dalai Lama, reminded him bitterly of what he and his fellow Buddhists had endured during the Cultural Revolution. Rinpoche chronicles his life story in beautifully fluid English that belies his recent learning of the language (no co-author is credited). Born in 1950, Rinpoche was chosen as the reincarnation of the last hereditary abbot after a series of fortuitous signs and prophecies, including his birth on the Dolon Nor Steppe to a family of nomads. It helped that his uncle Gyayak Rinpoche was the powerful teacher of the Panchen Lama, the spiritual leader of their Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism and the religious equal of the Dalai Lama. Immersed in practicing dharma and reciting sutras, the boy nonetheless had plenty of time to play and be mischievous. With the advent of the Great Leap Forward, however, cadres of Chinese Communists invaded the monasteries and organized struggles and public denunciations “to stamp out religion in the name of reform.” Famine, forced labor and imprisonment followed, and under the “dragon’s claw” the boy grew up secularly and without proper instruction. Rinpoche’s account offers valuable details of this absurd era, and he writes poignantly that he could no longer tolerate collaboration with the criminal regime once he had assumed his birthright at Kumbum.
A bold work that underscores Rinpoche’s cultural and political—rather than spiritual—journey.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60529-754-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
