Simple prose creates powerful imagery as the author examines how political oppression has shaped China and the lives of its...
Novelist Liang (Paper Butterfly, 2009, etc.) recounts the events of the 1989 massacre at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
First published in 1993, Liang’s debut memoir is scheduled for publication in the United States in time for the 20th anniversary of the event. Starting with her early childhood spent in labor camps, Liang paints a vivid picture of life during the Cultural Revolution. Her intellectual parents were forced to work on a construction site while everywhere people suffered public beatings, prison terms and executions at the slightest questioning of party loyalty. Universities were closed and progressive thought was banned. After the labor camps were shut down, the author’s parents were forced to live apart for more than a decade because of differing permits of residence. Growing up without her father, Liang endured constant beatings and harassment from her fellow students. Despite membership in the Communist party, her parents were intellectuals and not peasants, for which she and her younger sister suffered greatly. When the Cultural Revolution ended, universities reopened and Liang was able to enter Beijing University during a relatively liberal period. She joined in student demonstrations for freedom of speech and democracy while experiencing friendships, love and heartbreak. When the government intervened with the declaration of martial law in Beijing, the city was taken under siege. Early in the morning on June 4, 1989, tanks rolled in and opened fire on the peaceful protestors, killing thousands. Devastated by the massacre and fearful for her life, Liang was able to escape to America. Returning seven years later, she came face-to-face with the ghosts of that day and of her past life.
Simple prose creates powerful imagery as the author examines how political oppression has shaped China and the lives of its people.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3686-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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