An ancillary but meaningful document of a time too little chronicled and now all but forgotten by younger Chinese people.
Scarifying account of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
What brought about the revolution, apart from Mao’s constantly stirring things up to keep friends and enemies alike off balance? Ji (1911-2009) doesn’t profess to know, but he’s irritated at those who do have the answers and won’t release them: “I think their refusal,” he writes, “runs contrary to the attitude of truth-seeking that a materialist should have.” Whole worlds are encapsulated in that sentence, for the author remained until his death a supporter of the Communist state. That makes the events of June 1966 all the more incomprehensible to an outsider. It was then that he was branded a “reactionary capitalist academic authority” and initiated in a regime that in the months to come would involve questioning, haranguing, abuse, criticism, and self-criticism. The author allows that he had been the department head of an Asian languages program for 20 years, and given that the mob of Red Guards surrounding him wasn’t likely to leave him in peace, he selected the label that fit him most closely. The Red Guards were thorough in the extreme; they accused him of being insufficiently ardent by virtue of the fact that his portrait of the Great Leader wasn’t dusty. But Ji, never quite playing along—some degree of resistance, he later lets slip, was crucial to survival—replied that it wasn’t dusty because he cherished it so much that he polished it constantly. It was off to the metaphorical cowshed all the same. A bestseller in China, this memoir calls attention to the tremendous injustices wrought in that anarchic time. Western readers may find themselves unsold by the author’s too-frequent protestations that in recounting his tribulations, he means his former accusers and abusers no harm. Still, that seems a mere formula, for his pages seethe with grievance and reckoning.
An ancillary but meaningful document of a time too little chronicled and now all but forgotten by younger Chinese people.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59017-927-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
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