Vividly detailed vignettes of living with a remarkably generous people who are determined to move on.
An American journalist's low-key but affectionate account of her extended visits to Vietnam, beginning in the early 1990s, that reflect more personal than political reactions to a country recovering from its war-torn past and tentatively embracing western culture.
Sachs first visited Vietnam in 1989, when Americans were finally allowed to enter as tourists. Born in 1962, Sachs had only dim memories of the war, and her brief visit was the start of a love affair with the country. Back in the US, she set about learning Vietnamese and in 1992 returned for an extended stay. In Hanoi she rented rooms on Dream Street from a young family who soon became dear friends. Although not one of those fearless women who cross deserts on a camel, the author gradually did adapt to the cultural differences—being always recognizable as a foreigner was the hardest adjustment for her to make—and learned how to negotiate the crowded streets on her bicycle. As her Vietnamese improved, she was able to talk to people and was impressed by their willingness to forgive and forget. Vietnam had been at war (with different enemies) for centuries—and their greatest enmity seems reserved not for the Americans but the Chinese, whom they still fear. Sachs fell in love with Phai, a mechanic, but when she returned to the US she realized there were too many educational and cultural differences between them, and she ended up marrying an American instead. On her next visit, instead of teaching English, she worked as a journalist and associated more with the local intelligentsia than with the neighborhood street merchants. Warmed by the friendships she made, she later returned once more with husband and young son for what was, in fact, a joyous family reunion.
Vividly detailed vignettes of living with a remarkably generous people who are determined to move on.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2000
ISBN: 1-56512-291-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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