Charming memoir by prolific specialist in Japanese literature Keene (Travelers of a Hundred Ages, 1989, etc.), who seems to have found a culture that mirrored his character traits of introversion and flight into deep study. During the Depression, Keene won a four-year scholarship to Columbia, where he took up Chinese studies, then was led by a fellow student into the study of Japanese. Come Pearl Harbor, Keene volunteered for the Navy Language School at Berkeley. With no knowledge of warships or navigation, he entered the Pacific war as a Japanese language officer and was shipped as a lieutenant to Pearl Harbor. Stupefying boredom with useless translations led him to translating bloodsoaked diaries taken from dead Japanese soldiers on Guadalcanal and elsewhere, wherein he found an immense reservoir of feelings, while his duties censoring US sailors' letters revealed little but their desire to return home. Keene relished his free time among Japanese, Chinese, and Korean civilians in Honolulu and had absolutely no desire to go back to the States. At war's end, he was sent to China as a war-crimes investigator, a job he hated; then he granted himself a week's leave in Japan, which thrilled him, although he would not return there for another eight years. Back at Columbia, he found himself drawn to literary rather than philosophical Japanese writers. Later, in England on a scholarship to Cambridge, he taught conversational Japanese and remained abroad five years. His first published book disappeared unread, as did his second, though his third was a success. And at last the Ford Foundation sent him back to Japan, where he met Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburo Oe, and ``Renaissance Man'' Kobo Abe. Keene complains of lukewarm or worse reviews of his monumental survey volume World Without Walls (1976)—but the Kirkus reviewer gave it the same high praise this memoir deserves as well.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56836-006-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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