Nineteen years in Mao's labor camps—as chronicled by Wu (resident scholar at the Hoover Institution) and Wakeman (To the Storm—not reviewed). When the Communist forces took Shanghai in 1948, Wu (then 11) was living in a milieu of Western affluence and traditional culture. Although his father was a high-ranking bank official, the family remained in China, and in 1955 Wu, eager to build the new socialist society, went to the Beijing Geology Institute. He was devoted to his studies and to baseball, but he soon found that college life was dominated by political activities. His middle- class background and independent mind meant that he was repeatedly denounced for holding wrong opinions, even though he accepted Communism, and in April 1960, the morning after his graduation, he was summarily arrested as a political criminal and made to undergo reeducation through labor. His narrative takes us through years of deprivation, torture, and starvation in a world where the dead were carted out daily and the living were bombarded with ideological slogans. Among many others, we meet the peasant thief Xing, who teaches the young intellectual Wu the art of survival; and Lu, who loses his hope and sanity before finally succeeding in suicide. Wu was sustained by the insight that in such a world human life had no value, that the society was rotten if people didn't count, and that he would have a purpose if he tried to change that society. And thus, after his release and emigration to this country, he risked everything by returning to China in disguise with a CBS camera crew, and now has written this book. As an addition to the genre of Gulag literature, a remarkable and heroic story, recounted with great simplicity and nobility.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-55645-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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
PERSPECTIVES
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