An intensely personal yet jaggedly polytextual account of the AIDS panic that swept through Japan in the mid 1980s. While on sabbatical to write a book about the literature of the atomic bomb, Treat, a homosexual and an assistant professor of Asian languages and literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, runs smack into the AIDS epidemic, which he had imagined that he had left behind in the US. His account of the Japanese reaction to this tragedy is related in a complex narrative that deals with issues of sexual orientation, Orientalism, and the allure of Japan to the Western scholar. On one level this work is a very conventional, almost chatty memoir of a gay man exploring another culture. Treat takes us with him on a tour of Japan’s homosexual underground and explicitly describes his encounters with both local men and fellow tourists. Major themes here are his coming of age as a homosexual, his tenuous relationship with a lover in Seattle, and his growing sense of dread about his own health. This relatively straightforward narrative is constantly shattered, however, by intrusive bits of text gathered from a wide range of sources. The hypocrisy of the Japanese government’s response to the AIDS crisis, for example, is revealed in frequent bulletin-like bursts of quotations from official sources. First it is denied that Japan has any homosexuals at all, later that Japanese homosexuals participate in hardcore sex, use drugs, or are promiscuous. As the epidemic progresses, the government is forced to recognize its existence but becomes increasingly xenophobic and describes the disease as a foreign threat. The personal narrative is further splintered by the insertion of texts from such disparate sources as Thomas Mann, Ruth Benedict, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva, which explore the relationship between Western scholars and the East. Should attract those interested in gay studies, Orientalism, or Japan, and who have a high tolerance for what Treat terms his “wilful meanderings” of style.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-510923-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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