A candid, rewarding memoir that achieves both distance and intimacy.
Toronto journalist Wong (Beijing Confidential, 2007, etc.) recounts an extended trip she took to China to seek out a fellow student she had denounced during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1972, self-described “Montreal Maoist” Wong was invited to study at Beijing University. The 19-year-old, third-generation Chinese-Canadian was the first student there from the Great White North since the start of the Cultural Revolution. As a True Believer, she was the perfect guinea pig to restart an international student exchange, even though she did not then speak Mandarin. Indeed, she was such an enthusiastic collaborator in her own brainwashing, she admits, that she denounced a Chinese student, Yin, who confided that she wanted to get to America. Yin was subsequently expelled, and the author lost all trace of her. Guilt over her plight continued to plague Wong, and she resolved to track down Yin and apologize. In August 2006, the 53-year-old author boarded a plane with her white husband (whose Chinese name she humorously translates as Fat Paycheck) and her two reluctant teenaged sons. In search of Yin, she tracked down old acquaintances at the university, bouncing among cell-phone numbers in the new Beijing, where change was the only constant. Along the way, she confronted the great void left by the Maoist era. After Chinese society’s stunning about-face from fanatically revolutionary to zealously capitalist, participants in the Cultural Revolution had opted for collective amnesia, and 28 years of university records simply didn’t exist. Wong’s memoir offers a penetrating, frequently hilarious glimpse inside this teeming culture of wily rule-breakers and bargain-hunters on the eve of the 2008 Olympics, as Beijing was transformed by cataclysmic construction. Her private journey proved fruitful, allowing the author to explore a painful, confusing past, soothe old wounds and seek clarity and catharsis.
A candid, rewarding memoir that achieves both distance and intimacy.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101342-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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