With the same sharp penstrokes and brook-water prose he brought to Strong Drink, Strong Language (1990), novelist and linguist Espey (English/UCLA) carries on the droll memoirs about his boyhood in China. Material from Strong Drink first appeared during the 1940s in the New Yorker and was collected at that time in three books. This volume collects everything about China that Espey wishes to retain from his early works. Espey was born of Protestant missionary parents in Shanghai in 1913 and, with his elder sister Mary, spent the greater part of his life there until graduating from the Shanghai American school. The South Gate area where he lived was also home to a tribe of savage young vandals called alley brats, led by Lady Bandit, an albino girl who tormented the young Espeys with a variety of persecutions. One day little John, though forbidden to strike back, hurled a brickbat that left a permanent beauty mark Lady Bandit's forehead and caused her father to complain to his father about John's having lowered her bride price. When a bush grows in their yard, just on the spot where Father wants to build a tennis court, Mother curses the bush. The children later salt the earth around the bush and, when it dies, remind their mother of the fig tree in the Bible. We follow Espey's days as a Boy Scout, his trips up the Yangtze, years at school, his meeting with Chiang Kai-shek, and his introduction to sins of the flesh: his school headmistress inveighed against nakedness and the evil of the body and instituted a pre-breakfast half-mile jog around the athletic field in hopes of subduing the Adamic impulse. All freshness and charm, though seventy years have passed since the times laid down.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08250-8
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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
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
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