A masterful blend of personal, family, and national history set against the backdrop of South Korea's long fight for independence and democracy. Kang, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, combines fastidious academic research and personal recollection to create a vibrant, often disturbing account of a country caught in a centuries-long clash between world superpowers. The period of Japanese colonialism is embodied in the story of Kang's paternal grandfather, Myong-Hwan Kang, whose mind and spirit were shattered when he was twice arrested and tortured for nationalist activities. Celebration over the end of Japanese domination with their loss in WW II was interrupted by the outbreak of the Korean War. In 1946, when Kang was three, she and her mother escaped from their home in the north, going first to Seoul and then to a refugee camp in Pusan; they waited there over a year for passports so that they could rejoin Kang's father in Tokyo, where he was working as an interpreter for the American government. Finally, the two made an illegal crossing and were detained by the Japanese and finally released on bond, still without passports. Kang walks the line between Korean, Japanese, and American culture, and is acutely aware of the tensions among these separate worlds. As a woman she is intellectually attracted to the freedom inherent in American culture, but emotionally she is drawn toward her country of birth, despite its complex social hierarchies. When her parents join her in San Francisco in 1975, they are forced to start from scratch in a new country that does not credit them for past victories. The two buy a grocery store and are perceived like many other Korean immigrants—as if they come from a race of storekeepers who have little other experience. Deft and timely, this helps dispel many misconceptions about one of our nation's least understood immigrant populations.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-201-62684-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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
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