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I STAND CORRECTED

HOW TEACHING WESTERN MANNERS IN CHINA BECAME ITS OWN UNFORGETTABLE LESSON

Entertaining, informative adventures of a woman determined to understand the people of China.

One woman’s experiences while living and writing in China.

Often, the only way to fully understand a foreign country is to actually live in that country for a time. After years of travel around the world, Collinsworth (It Might Have Been What He Said, 2007) found herself drawn once again to China, a country she had visited on many occasions over a period of years. Fascinated by its culture and people, she moved to Beijing with her son, Gilliam, and set out to understand its nuances. “Like a complicated mathematical equation I was determined to solve, China called me back numerous times…” she writes. “There came many adventures, but only one revelation: I would remain forever and beguilingly mystified by the Middle Kingdom.” Based on her observations, she decided the Chinese needed a book on how to interact with Western men and women, so she wrote a guidebook called The Tao of Improving Your Likability: A Personal Guide to Effective Business Etiquette in Today’s Global World. In the process of writing the book, Collinsworth discovered many aspects about her own business relationships that required deeper scrutiny, which she explores here. She also incorporates details of her life with her son prior to her move to China. As he grew into adulthood, they traveled around the world, which proved an eclectic and enlightening education for both of them. Collinsworth’s observations bring the Chinese and their rituals and history to life, and she adroitly circles each chapter around in order to weave in lessons from her Tao handbook as well. These topics include everything from how to shake hands with a man or woman to proper table manners to how to graciously accept an apology or a compliment.

Entertaining, informative adventures of a woman determined to understand the people of China.

Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-53869-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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