Fascinating to those interested in the Hawaii Campbells or local history, but of little interest to the general reader.
Retired Hawaiian attorney James S. Campbell combines family history with personal memoir in his first book.
Campbell traces his family tree back to his great-grandparents, who emigrated from Ireland to Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, via the United States in the mid-1800s. Providing details not just on his direct ancestors but his great-great aunts and uncles as well, Campbell avoids the tendency of some genealogists to self-aggrandize through the accomplishments of their forebears and gives equal treatment to his less-prominent relatives. He weaves information on the history of Hawaii through his family’s story, although he seems to presuppose a certain familiarity with Hawaiian history and language. The author’s recognition of the matrilineal as well as the patrilineal side of his family is especially refreshing. As he brings the story to his own personal experiences, during World War II and later, his account becomes more interesting, especially his memories of the war, post-war period and plantation life, with an amusing anecdote about the “aunties” who visited the plantation workmen on payday. Interestingly, the Campbells’s early self-identification as natives of the Sandwich Islands, despite their lengthy sojourn in New York and New Jersey, is echoed by many others of European descent. Campbell’s biting commentary on trust-fund children may displease some of this privileged group, which includes members of his own family. On another financial note, the author points out the speed with which many of the early missionaries to Hawaii became wealthy landholders–sadly, greed and the manipulation of natives by newcomers is a recurring theme in Hawaii’s history. Campbell’s evaluation of Hawaii’s economy, which is based nearly exclusively on tourism but does not offer lucrative careers to Hawaiians, will make readers reevaluate their perception of Hawaii as “paradise.” It is paradise only to a privileged few. While the illustrations used are inexplicably not in the same order that they are introduced in the text, Country of Origin is otherwise well-researched and well put together, utilizing primary resources and oral history interviews.
Fascinating to those interested in the Hawaii Campbells or local history, but of little interest to the general reader.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4196-6438-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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