Displays little art or artifice but freezes the heart and seizes the soul.
A young man who spent ten years of his youth in a North Korean prison camp tells the story of his life before his family’s arrest, of his dreary years of imprisonment, of his release, and of his perilous escape through China to South Korea.
Rigoulot speaks only in the introduction, where he declares that this is “the first detailed testimony about a North Korean prison camp to be published in the West.” And a chilling testimony it is. With his family in Pyongyang, Chol-hwan was living fairly well, by North Korean standards. His principal childhood interest was tropical fish—at one time he had ten aquariums lining the walls of his room. After an interlude for some family history and a description of daily life in Korea, Chol-hwan reports the ominous disappearance of his grandfather in 1977 when the author was only nine. The old man had been guilty of some vague treason against what is portrayed as a quintessentially paranoid government. A few weeks later, four security agents appeared, helped themselves to most of the family’s possessions, and then sent virtually the entire family off to the mountainous Yodok prison camp. Only the mother was spared: her family had a “heroic” background. In remarkably serene prose, Chol-hwan describes the deprivations and horrors he and his loved ones experienced for the next ten years, including living in fetid quarters, dressing in rags, suffering continual humiliations and beatings, eating salamanders (raw) and rats (cooked), working in brutal conditions, and witnessing numerous executions—almost always for attempted escapes. An enterprising and strong boy, Chol-hwan learned the ropes and how to twirl them and so managed to survive and even to feel some sorrow at leaving his friends when, unexpectedly, the authorities released his entire family. The final third of the narrative deals with the author’s reintegration into North Korean society and his eventual escape to the south.
Displays little art or artifice but freezes the heart and seizes the soul.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-01101-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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