An urgent cry for compassion for the author’s fellow North Koreans, trapped and strangled of liberty and life.
A sobering account of survival of the fittest in North Korea by a young woman on the run for nearly a decade.
Translated originally from the French edition and reading like a slender, exciting, first-person French novel, this chronicle by Eunsun Kim (a nom de plume) re-creates in immediate-feeling detail the horrific conditions of starvation that prompted her mother to flee with the author and her sister across the Tumen River bordering China in the winter of 1998. The author, then 11 years old but appearing much younger due to her blighted growth caused by malnutrition, had been fairly oblivious to the increasingly dire conditions in North Korea as the famine gripped the country and food rations were cut back. Having lost the family’s beloved father, then the grandparents, the author’s mother nearly lost all hope, until she resolved to defect to China and become a traitor to her country—knowing little about the outside world and how hoodwinked the regimes of presidents Kim Il-sung (d. 1994) and his son Kim Jong-il kept the North Korean residents. Rejected by relatives when they showed up at an aunt’s house, the mother and two daughters lived on the streets in Rajin until the Tumen froze again and they could scurry across the river. Soon taken advantage of by a hardened procuress and forced into marriage with a Chinese peasant, the author’s mother had to bear a son in order to gain some freedom. The women dispersed into teeming Chinese cities to find jobs and gain false papers. It took years to make the necessary fortune required to pay smugglers to take them over the Mongolian border, at incredible risk and danger. Yet the welcome South Korea tendered toward the family was heartening, even if the South Koreans tended to look down on these poor refugees.
An urgent cry for compassion for the author’s fellow North Koreans, trapped and strangled of liberty and life.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06464-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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