An easy-flowing tale that subsumes historical changes in personal histories, especially the plight of the author’s...
An intimate, unhistorical, uneven synthesis of the stories of three generations of Chinese wives, mothers and daughters.
The author, a Chinese-British financial lawyer who now runs a restaurant called Sweet Mandarin with her two sisters in Manchester, England, begins her affectionate, family narrative with the hardscrabble story of her grandmother Lily, born to an entrepreneur and his wife in Guangzhou who only wanted sons but got six daughters instead. Despite a growing business making and selling soy sauce, which took them to Hong Kong in 1925, the family’s fortunes turned sour when Lily’s father was murdered in his Guangzhou factory by a jealous local gang. Due to the nation’s patrilinear traditions, his widow and daughters were essentially turned out of their home. Lily’s job as a maid/nanny to the wealthy British Woodmans in Hong Kong eventually brought her to England in the early 1950s. By then estranged from a philandering gambler of a husband, she saved up to bring her children to England and was able to start a Chinese takeout restaurant in Manchester with the money Mrs. Woodman left Lily in her will. Lily’s daughter, Mabel, was brought up working in the business and in the late ’70s started her own “corner chippy” in Middleton; the author and her siblings toiled there during their growing-up years. Although she belonged to one of the first Chinese families in Middleton, Tse did not feel herself a victim of racism and became thoroughly assimilated into British life. She offers interesting takes on her family’s gambling, gang culture in Hong Kong and the stunning misogyny still rampant in Chinese society.
An easy-flowing tale that subsumes historical changes in personal histories, especially the plight of the author’s grandmother.Pub Date: July 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37936-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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