A true “fly-on-the-wall” account of the momentous changes in Chinese society and international relations over the last...
Longtime translator for Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong recounts his arduous and ultimately vindicating life’s journey through some of China’s darkest decades.
Landowners from Shanxi province and early communist sympathizers, Ji’s parents escaped the turmoil of the Japanese invasion and civil war by fleeing to New York in 1939 on the urging of Zhou Enlai, who had been a teenaged friend of Ji’s much older brother, Chaoding. While Ji excelled at Horace Mann-Lincoln and earned a scholarship to Harvard, learning perfect English and growing to love his adopted country, Chaoding was working for the Kuomintang’s minister of finance and feeding secrets to Zhou and the communists. The political winds shifted by 1949, when the victorious communists established the People’s Republic of China and the Cold War ensured that Ji was no longer welcome in America. He began his incredible roller-coaster career in China as a Foreign Ministry official and had his biggest moment on the world stage when he served as interpreter for Zhou and Mao during President Nixon’s visit in 1972. Initially an enthusiastic Communist Party member, he first began to have doubts about Mao’s increasingly absurd policies during the purges of the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the 1950s. They increased when Ji saw the mass chaos and starvation caused by the Great Leap Forward in 1958–60, followed by the violent zealotry of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966. Ji’s Western education and his wife’s Taiwan connections branded him a “capitalist roader,” and he was periodically sent to shovel pig manure in the countryside to atone for this sin. He endured the relentless cycle of purges and rehabilitation with equanimity and grace, serving in diplomatic posts in London and at the UN in New York, eventually fashioning this brave, beautifully written testimony with the editorial assistance of ghostwriter Foster Winans, who reworked the Chinese-language text published in 1999.
A true “fly-on-the-wall” account of the momentous changes in Chinese society and international relations over the last century.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6584-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
