A disturbing but well-told memoir about the true costs of Asian fetishization.
A former pinup model analyzes how her Asian American identity has affected her life and career.
Yu, a Taiwanese American, wanted to become part of the entertainment industry at a time when Asian American role models were few and far between. Some who were successful catered to tropes that fetishized Asian women in service to white male “Asiaphiles” invested in the “myopic, generalized belief that Asian women inherently embody traits of submissiveness and obedience.” Yu longs to embody the opposite of these traits but feels that her sexuality is the only tool she has to become the person she longs to be. She writes, “I felt the straightest path to empowerment was through courting the white male gaze.” Yu’s pursuit of success within a cultural milieu that degrades and fetishizes Asian American women traumatizes her on multiple levels. Most notably, as an up-and-coming model, she ends up at a photo shoot where the director sexually assaults her, films the encounter against her will, and releases the video publicly without her consent. The unprocessed trauma follows her through her successful career as a model, a coveted cameo in the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and a member of the all-girl Asian American rock band Nylon Pink. Yu struggles with addiction, an issue that she connects with her desire to escape both the memories of her assault and the compromises inherent in pursuing a career dedicated to appeasing the white male gaze. This is a raw memoir, and Yu expertly balances visceral, emotional scenes from her life with trenchant social criticism.
A disturbing but well-told memoir about the true costs of Asian fetishization.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780593728017
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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