The intelligent and affecting memoir of a young woman who grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and managed to thrive despite its horrors. Sun-Childers, who authored this autobiography with her American husband, has only the vaguest memories of life before the Cultural Revolution. She writes that her parents, a beautiful young couple who spoiled their plump little daughter, had both been government-employed graduates of the prestigious Chinese Diplomatic Institute. But in 1966, when Jaia was two years old, life changed drastically for her and her parents. Suddenly beauty became bourgeois, intellectual pursuits suspect. During the week Jaia attended a boarding kindergarten where strict teachers taught the children to recite Chairman Mao's wisdom before they were old enough to read his words or understand them. Jaia's mother was sent, and Jaia with her, to a reeducation camp, while Jaia's father became a philandering midlevel employee of the new government regime. Jaia, meanwhile, was torn between the desire to be a good little red soldier—who denounced her own mother, with near-disastrous consequences, for accidentally dropping a pin with Chairman Mao's picture on it facedown on the ground—and feelings of resentment when she was criticized by her cruel, politically savvy peers for being too good at her studies, too clean, or too vain about her appearance. But when Jaia was still an adolescent, the Gang of Four were denounced, and intellectuals were exonerated. Jaia was allowed—encouraged—to study and achieve. She was finally sent to America to attend college, where she has remained. Many stories have been shared about casualties of the Cultural Revolution, but Sun-Childers's stands out for its unique childhood perspective and its probing treatment of the loss of innocence. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14093-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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