A hip and lively narrative of human-rights activism in Burma. Mirante spent the 1970's in San Francisco, ``dressed in black velvet and antelope leather,'' slinking ``through dangerous neighborhoods with a legendary vampire guitarist.'' She also painted, and in the early 80's started spending longer and longer periods in Asia, where she went to refine her artistic technique. Mirante ended up hanging out with rebel Burmese tribes on the border between Burma and Thailand, making friends with some vivid characters, like Prince George, an Anglophilic rebel leader who habitually breakfasted on Mekong whiskey, and Spin, a photojournalist and drifter through Asia. After a period of increasing outrage at the regime of Burmese dictator Ne Win and at the US for supplying defoliant for use against the rebels, Mirante founded Project Maje, devoted to publicizing the plight of the ten tribes in the area—a plight that rarely found its way into the media until the widespread upheavals of 1988. Jailed twice, once for an illegal border-crossing and once without being charged, Mirante is now persona non grata in Thailand. Here, her eye for setting a scene and her gift for evoking rebels, brigands, hippies, and sinister security forces pull the reader into a Terry and the Pirates world where those who tread quickly get ``burnt out by wars, companion fatigue, survivor guilt, hepatitis.'' A dramatic but caring book in which Mirante's blithe tone doesn't disguise her earnest concern for the worsening conditions faced by the Burmese hill tribes.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1457-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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