High-class retelling of the real-life affair behind the mistaken-sex plot of M. Butterfly. Wadler wrote the poignant My Breast (1992). Bernard Boursicot sought adventure and, in the early 60's, wound up clerking for the French embassy in Beijing as a 20-year- old virgin who'd detached himself from some distasteful homosexual episodes as a schoolboy. In China, he met Shi Pei Pu, a small, mysterious, and apparently male singer who'd played women's roles with the Beijing Opera. After many months of shared lunches and dinners, Pei Pu revealed to Bernard that he was actually a woman. His anxiety-ridden parents had raised him as a boy, he said, and, in unisex Mao clothes, it had been easy to pass as a man. Slowly, Bernard fell for Pei Pu, then began having sex with her/him, usually in the dark but not always. According to both, this was passionate sex, and, 18 years later, Bernard still thought Pei Pu a woman despite the singer's affairs with other women. When the two were arrested in Paris for spying (Bernard had fallen under the spell of Mao's Little Red Book and performed some innocuous spying for China so he could stay with Pei Pu and care for his supposed son by the singer), doctors proved that Pei Pu was a man. How had the guileful Pei Pu duped Bernard for so long? Well, the answer convinces but won't be revealed here, since Wadler (who badgers Bernard in several interviews reprinted throughout the text) passes through several explanations before arriving, on her last page, at the real trick used by Pei Pu.... Compelling and faintly bittersweet. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-553-09213-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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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