A book that offers great clarity on an important subject without succumbing to oversimplification.
A British journalist with considerable experience in China illuminates the significance of artist and activist Ai Weiwei and his embodiment of cultural upheaval.
In a good way, this reads like an extended magazine article written for a general readership. Martin presents a profile of the artist based on illicit interviews with Weiwei following his release from 81 days of imprisonment on inscrutable charges, while providing context on the political and cultural developments that have informed his art. The plainspoken lucidity of the prose transcends the murk of so much arts criticism and political theorizing, as the author recognizes that many readers won’t be familiar with the artist’s career and the specifics of Communist Party repression in China. “I had been toying with the idea of writing a book about modern China that would use an account of Ai Weiwei’s life as its backbone,” writes Martin, employing the first-person narrative that initially seems intrusive but ultimately enhances the conversational tone. “His life and that of his father, Ai Qing, one of China’s most famous twentieth-century poets, are so intertwined with the great people and events of modern Chinese history that any biographical account would necessarily touch on the main historical events of the post-imperial epoch.” And so this book does, though it is less than a full-scale biography and more of a series of interviews, with the secret police frequently hovering, augmented by the author’s visits with other Chinese dissidents. Weiwei emerges as not only a great disciple of Duchamp and Dada, bridging the totalitarianism of Chairman Mao and Warhol’s Mao, but also a brave activist using his art and advocacy to inspire cultural revolution: “Weiwei’s experience had given him an almost evangelical zeal: he wanted to change China by changing its ideas about art.”
A book that offers great clarity on an important subject without succumbing to oversimplification.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-16775-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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