A physician’s illuminating examination of modern Xinjiang.
In his memoir, Hung (FOB in Paradise, 2014, etc.) writes of his years volunteering as an ophthalmologist among China’s Uyghurs.
Almost everyone Hung met in Xinjiang was surprised he was there. Once an important section of the Silk Road—a place of convergence for disparate peoples and empires—the land of the Uyghurs is now a provincial backwater of modern China known for containing the point on Earth farthest from any ocean. Why would Hung, a Chinese-American ophthalmologist, travel to such a place? The tales of the Silk Road transfixed Hung since childhood, and his recent retirement afforded him the freedom to finally see it. Over the course of a decade, and up against the hurdles of poor resources, folk medicine, and communist bureaucracy, Hung managed to use his medical training to improve the lives of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities of China’s Northwestern province, immersing himself in their traditional cultures along the way. Interspersed with his tales of his time in Xinjiang are bits of history about the Silk Road and accounts of Hung’s further travels in Central Asia. (The caption of one photograph: “Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 2002. On a dilapidated bus just after having my wallet stolen”) Chinese-born, Hong Kong–raised, Nebraska-educated, and Honolulu-based Hung is an endearing mix of benevolence, wryness, and curiosity, traipsing around in his Hawaiian shirts and safari jacket, attempting to bring improved eye care to total strangers. The passages about diseases and treatments prove his expertise, but the book is at its most entertaining when Hung describes the people he meets, the meals he enjoys, and the social interactions that are heavily laden with the implications of nationality, class, and ego. He is perhaps not as great a writer as he is a doctor (this is a meandering work, not at all a page-turner), but there is an appealing Marco Polo–ishness to his project: a boundless wonder for a society unlike his own, not for its differences but for the infinitely recognizable humanity at its center.
A physician’s illuminating examination of modern Xinjiang.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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