Amid the author’s personal journey reside priceless cultural and professional insights.
The experiences of an American couple in South Korea underscore how little the West really knows about the country.
A business journalist by profession who spent 18 years at the Washington Post, Ahrens landed a gig at the largest car company in Korea after he married a diplomat. Upon arrival, he had two main realizations: that he was rare in his new environment (the country is 97 percent Korean) and that he held “many of the classic white American stereotypes about Asians: hardworking, good students, quiet, and reserved.” During his time as a Hyundai executive from 2010 to 2013, the author learned to admire the depth of the Korean people in many unique ways, delineated with humor and warmth in this book. Originally from Charleston, West Virginia, conservative and Christian by temperament, Ahrens married Rebekah, who received her first assignment overseas in 2009. With his early mechanical training, Ahrens was a natural at marketing Hyundai, especially in meeting with foreign journalists and in directing efforts at good English writing and editing. Initially, however, his American style was considered brash and even rude—e.g., asking colleagues to call him Frank (he thought it would be easier for them) when the workplace protocol called for a decisive hierarchical structure between the low- and higher-ranking officers, expressed in honorific addresses according to traditions in Confucianism. Moreover, the competitiveness among co-workers spilled over in official Saturday morning hiking sessions, which Ahrens despised, and intensive nighttime drinking bouts, all having the effect of creating an atmosphere of camaraderie without any one member standing out. Eventually, the author had to hone his skills at noonchi, “reading the air,” a kind of subtle, complex sense of what was going on. Running alongside Ahrens’s own personal “midlife crisis” were Hyundai’s great efforts to elevate the middling brand into the luxury market, alongside German and Japanese cars.
Amid the author’s personal journey reside priceless cultural and professional insights.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-240524-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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