Marsh’s uneven account provides a valuable glimpse into immigrant life and what it means to leave one’s homeland and start...
The true story of a Vietnamese family that immigrates to the United States and the terror, heartbreak and joy they experience along the way.
In 1980, 9-year-old Mai Tran and her brother Hieu, 15, manage to escape communist Vietnam by boat, only to endure a long, harrowing trip to nearby Malaysia. Stuck there for six months as they await visas to America, the siblings learn the skillful and sometimes dangerous art of survival by all means necessary. Ultimately, they reunite with their father and other family members in America to begin a new life. Marsh tells the story from Mai’s perspective, so the reader is placed in the unique position of watching Mai grow from a shy little girl into a sophisticated young woman in a strange, new world as she struggles to find balance between Vietnamese traditions and a modern American life. Before she arrives, Mai envisions the United States as a land of great wealth and opportunity, and she’s initially delighted by its creature comforts—running water, toilets and shopping malls, among them. New customs and fashions intrigue her; she had never before worn underwear or celebrated Halloween. But as she grows older, Mai sees that life in her adopted homeland is more complicated than she imagined. While Mai’s story is compelling, Marsh’s storytelling can fall a bit flat and the dialogue may strike some readers as a bit too rudimentary. When asked if she’s looking forward to school starting, Mai responds, “Yes. I didn’t fail second grade, so I’m in the third grade now.” However, Marsh’s attention to detail serves the story well, particularly in evoking memorable suspense like Mai’s near drowning as she attempts to leave Vietnam.
Marsh’s uneven account provides a valuable glimpse into immigrant life and what it means to leave one’s homeland and start over in a foreign country.Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0557987993
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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