A unique perspective on a period of critical transformations in China. (b&w photos)
The extraordinary life of a courageous, outspoken American woman who survived 40 years of upheaval in 20th-century China.
In 1928, the Tennessee-born Grace Divine (1901–79) moved to New York to study for a career in opera. There she met and married Liu Fu-Chi, a wedding that made headlines in her hometown, where mixed-race unions were illegal. Fu-chi returned to his native China in 1932; Grace, now pregnant, planned to follow after their baby was born. It was nearly two years before she set off with her toddler daughter to join her husband in Tianjin, where she lived for the next 40 years, bearing two more children. Grace's son and her cousin tell her remarkable story by quoting at length from letters, articles, and a memoir she wrote. The narrative encompasses the Japanese invasion of China, WWII, horrendous postwar inflation, the communist revolution, her husband's death, Chairman Mao's short-lived Hundred Flowers movement, a radical mastectomy, and the Cultural Revolution, during which she was denounced as a “counter-revolutionary American spy,” jailed, and interrogated. Grace was eventually allowed to return to her job training teachers of college English; after she died in 1979, her Chinese colleagues held a moving memorial service. A partial memoir and, most especially her letters, offer vivid accounts of a roller-coaster life and the transformation of a well-off bourgeoisie with a cook and amahs into a loyal communist living in one room with a coal stove. Grace recounts the corruption and cruelty of the Kuomintang regime and the early successes of the new communist government. She also includes her lengthy self-criticism in front of her colleagues at the university (required during Mao's Great Leap Forward). Through it all, however, Grace never regretted her decision to remain in China—originally for her husband, then for her children, and finally for the happiness that life there brought to her.
A unique perspective on a period of critical transformations in China. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-314-5
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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