A haunting, cleareyed account of the hardships imposed by war and tyranny.
Huyen recounts growing up during politically perilous times in Vietnam.
Debut author Huyen was born in 1936 in Cat Ba, North Vietnam. Her father had a prominent position working with the French Vietnamese at a customs house, and her family enjoyed a safe, prosperous life in a palatial home. Her happy world was shattered, however, when the French left and the Japanese invaded, forcing her family from her house. Her father lost his job and was all but bankrupt, and the author gave up her dreams of a good education. Not only did the family suffer from poverty and rootlessness, but also regular bombings from American combat planes. The Japanese occupation eventually ended, but then the Chinese invaded, and the Communists took over. Huyen’s mother sold rice to make ends meet. The family moved to Saigon as part of a program sponsored by the United States, and the author’s mother had her birth certificate falsified so she could work as a tailor. The family was impoverished until a family friend lent them a considerable sum of money in return for Huyen moving to Laos to help her with her business. In Laos, predatory males plagued her; she turned down an offer to become a wealthy man’s mistress, despite the financial boon the arrangement would have been for her family. She was repeatedly assaulted and raped by her employers and impregnated by one of them. Huyen’s remembrance is a heart-rending one of a life upended by geopolitical tumult. Some readers will find her accounts of sexual assault hard to read and her responses to them bewildering. She claims to miss one employer who tried to rape her more than once and “was moved” by the affection of another immediately after he raped her. This remains an affecting tale, nonetheless, told simply and powerfully by a remarkably resilient woman.
A haunting, cleareyed account of the hardships imposed by war and tyranny.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5349-3763-5
Page Count: 140
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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