Engaging, timely, and humane.
An exploration of the role of faith in contemporary China.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Johnson (A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, 2010, etc.) delves into the lives of several families and communities as they live out varying faith traditions in China. Along the way, he provides useful history lessons on how religion in China has come to be what it is today. In touching, descriptive prose, Johnson brings his subjects to life amid a colorful backdrop. The author explains that early communist rule had largely tolerated religion as a necessary component of controlling the vast population, especially in rural areas. Under Mao, however, that tolerance evaporated. The leader’s war on faith was part of a larger war on civilization itself and served only to destroy much of the fabric of society. “When the Cultural Revolution ended,” writes Johnson, “many wondered if they could ever trust anyone again.” In the wake of Mao, the state found religion to be a useful tool in rebuilding society and civil trust. However, this did not mean there was to be any meaningful freedom of religion. Johnson points out that China’s traditional religions of Daoism, Buddhism, and harder-to-define folk religions enjoy the most latitude. Traditions with foreign ties, such as Christianity, are viewed with much more suspicion. Nevertheless, readers may be surprised to read of church groups such as Early Rain, which seem to operate complex organizations with somewhat limited state interference. Throughout this worthwhile study, the author touches on a wide array of issues related to faith in Chinese culture, including the advent of the technology age, urbanization, respect for the dead, the role of family, and the ever looming communist state. Some may argue that Johnson’s work is anecdotal in nature and therefore presents only a sliver of religious life in such a vast nation as China, but the author uses his anecdotal approach to the best possible advantage.
Engaging, timely, and humane.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-87005-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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