Japanese scholars will devour this testament by one of their own. Others may find it a half-readable curiosity.
A professor’s love affair with Japan and its language.
Seidensticker (Tokyo Rising, 1990, etc.) traces the origin of his lifelong engagement with Japanese culture to a crucial decision taken during WWII. Just graduated from the University of Colorado, he at all costs wanted to avoid being an Army grunt. So he joined the Navy’s Japanese language school instead and became a Marine, carrying books and dictionaries in his rucksack during the invasion of Iwo Jima. From there he moved on to Japan and stayed for years. Seidensticker is not a flashy or emotional writer. He states explicitly that this is not a personal history per se but rather a memoir about his connection to things Japanese over the course of his life. The resulting quirky tone can frustrate with its elusiveness, but on occasion it offers delightful, well-timed insights, as when a flat discussion of a boring but esteemed teacher ends with the author realizing that everyone else in the class is as bored and miserable as he is. Seidensticker also conveys a wonderfully unadulterated sense of place. He clearly loves his native Colorado, whose mountains are described with a gusto he never voices with regard to the natural attractions of Japan. There, his energy is devoted to loving characterizations of people, especially the writers he’s translated: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Unfortunately, passages featuring these writers often become bogged down in turgid discussions of the Cold War’s influence on Japanese intellectual life. Although those familiar with the intrigues fostered by the Congress for Cultural Freedom will find new material here, in that Seidensticker is concerned with Asia, lay readers will be confused, and in hindsight, Congress seems a tempest in a teapot not worth the space it gets.
Japanese scholars will devour this testament by one of their own. Others may find it a half-readable curiosity.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-295-98134-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Washington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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