Simply told, with a delicate political balance for the most part carefully managed, the story of the girl in the photograph...
The tale of the girl, Kim Phuc, who survived the napalm burns (the result of "friendly fire") that sent her fleeing in terror and pain into history.
Via interviews, documents, and published reports, Chong (The Concubine's Children, 1995) reconstitutes the life of Kim Phuc in the context of her family and her war-torn, economically stricken country. That Kim, as she now calls herself, did not die from her wounds is virtually a miracle; she was raced to a hospital by the photographer, Nick Ut, who took the picture. The middle of nine children and in frequent pain from the scars and consequences of her burns, Kim survived near-starvation and the primitive living conditions forced on her once prosperous family by war and politics and even managed to qualify for medical school. It was her mother Nu's noodle shop that kept the family going, its ups and downs the stuff of mythology as it follows the course of war, peace, and vindictive bureaucracy. Kim was rediscovered by the international press and used by the now-Communist Vietnam regime as a propaganda tool. Befriended by prime minister Pham Van Dong, successor to Ho Chi Minh, she eventually persuaded the government to send her to Cuba to study. In Cuba, she met her future husband, and together they defected to the West. Today, she lives with her husband, two children, and her parents in Toronto and travels frequently to speak on behalf of world peace.
Simply told, with a delicate political balance for the most part carefully managed, the story of the girl in the photograph is one of horror, survival, and hope—a primer if not the definitive text for those trying to understand the Vietnam war. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88040-X
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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