A coming-of-age memoir by a young Canadian woman with a literary bent whose three-year sojourn in a Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas challenged her values, changed her religion, and altered her life’s course. In 1988, Zeppa, a graduate student hungry for experience and uncertain about her future, took a two-year teaching job offered by the World University Service of Canada that sent her to eastern Bhutan. The shock of isolation and privation was at first overwhelming, but Zeppa soon fell in love with her new world. Initially posted to the tiny, remote village of Pema Gatshel to teach young children, she was transferred several months later to the campus of Sherubtse College, where her students were closer to her own age and where living conditions were somewhat less primitive. It is here that her idyllic view of the Bhutanese undergoes some refinement. She becomes uncomfortably aware of the country’s political problems, of the lack of personal privacy, and of the extreme pressure for social conformity. Still enthralled by the beauty of Bhutan’s pristine mountain setting and in love with Tshewang, a Bhutanese student (she and her Canadian fiancÇ having long since parted company), Zeppa stays on for a third year. While the early portion of her story is delightful—her enthusiasm for Bhutan and its people is infectious and her descriptions of her encounters with Bhutanese culture are often funny and always enlightening” her account of her relationship with her Bhutanese lover falls flat. The ending seems rushed and unfinished. Her pregnancy and subsequent return to Canada, where her son Pema Dorji is born, her return to Bhutan, her marriage to Tshewang there in 1993, and her return to Canada—all this is compressed into a few pages. An uneven account with many perceptive, lyrical passages.
Pub Date: June 7, 1999
ISBN: 1-57322-118-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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