A fine tribute to the strength of the human spirit and a reminder of the forces that threaten it.
The story of Lu Decheng, a Chinese dissident who threw paint-filled eggs at a huge portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Canadian author Chong (The Girl in the Picture: The Remarkable Story of Vietnam’s Most Famous Casualty, 2001, etc.) weaves Lu’s story into a much larger narrative of life in China during the past half century. The author opens with the crucial scene in the Square. Odd-numbered chapters continue this narrative, taking Lu through his interrogation by the police, his formal arrest and trial and his imprisonment, during which he dealt with the strictures of prison life by reading, studying and resisting attempts to “reform” him. Even-numbered chapters recount Lu’s forebears, his childhood in Clear Water Alley in the river town of Liuyang, his mother’s death, his life with his new stepmother and his troubled relationship with his father, who worried that his son was becoming a liumang, a “street rascal” or “hooligan.” The rebellious Lu spent two months in a detention center for an adolescent prank before becoming an apprentice bus mechanic. His love affair with the teenage Qiuping, who became pregnant, reveals much about Chinese restrictions on marriage and child bearing and the methods used to force compliance with the one-child law. Lu shared his dissatisfaction with life under a repressive dictatorship and his growing awareness of corruption and nepotism in the Communist Party with other young members of the pro-democracy movement, forming a bond with Yu Zhijian and Yu Dongyue, later his companions on the expedition to Tiananmen Square. The two narratives converge in the penultimate chapter, as Lu is released from prison in 1998 and returned to Liuyang. Matching the opening sequence, the final chapter is a vivid, blow-by-blow account of the acts leading up to the spirited dictatorship-defying defacement of Mao’s portrait. An author’s note summarizes subsequent events in the life of Lu, who now lives in political asylum in Canada.
A fine tribute to the strength of the human spirit and a reminder of the forces that threaten it.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58243-547-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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