Intelligent, albeit conjectural; rangy yet concise—thoughtful work from an experienced Sinologist.
Tightly structured, nimble pocket portrait of China’s First Emperor.
Qin Shihuangdi (259–210 BCE), who took power in 246 BCE, has had many mantles draped across his shoulders: founder of imperial China, enemy of the intellect, seeker of immortality, father of the world’s most elephantine bureaucracy, tyrant of the first order. But primary-source material about him is not thick on the ground, points out Wood, head of the Chinese Department at the British Library—certainly not as thick on the ground as the 8,000-man terracotta army the Emperor had buried with him. (That’s the subject of John Man’s The Terra Cotta Army, 2008, which makes a nice complement to this more straightforward biography.) Wood judiciously relies on the archaeological record, on a trove of bamboo-slip documents found at the Place of the Sleeping Tiger and on The Grand Scribe’s Records, the work of a court astrologer writing a century later under a different dynasty. The Emperor’s accomplishments suggest a strong, autocratic character, someone who could bring the anarchic Warring States to heel. He was a book-burner, wanting to focus his subjects’ attention on the present rather than some mythical, golden past. (Squelching Confucianism and Daoism was probably an additional motive.) He initiated the Great Wall, described here in captivating archaeological detail. He brought bureaucratic order and standardization to a great state in which agriculture and military prowess were of primary importance. Wood also provides colorful social-history tidbits: Peasants were forbidden to dye their clothes; a third-century BCE feast would have included “plump orioles, pigeons and geese, flavoured with broth of jackal’s meat.” He also paints in broad strokes such topics as the debate between Confucianism and legalism, the boasts Mao made about having outdone Qin Shihuangdi (“He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried 460,000”) and the role of the afterlife in Chinese history, always with an eye as to how they illuminate the First Emperor.
Intelligent, albeit conjectural; rangy yet concise—thoughtful work from an experienced Sinologist.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-38112-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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