Shaped and voiced with literary flair, this is clearly a book Yamashita felt compelled to write, and her sense of purpose...
A multilayered evocation of Japanese internment camps as experienced by the author’s extended family.
The thematic ambition of this project transcends category. It isn’t quite memoir or even the memory of stories told by earlier generations. Title aside, it isn’t a collection of letters, though such an archive spurred Yamashita (I Hotel, 2010, etc.) to feel she could become “a useful repository of the past.” She quotes the letters sparingly, and most of the longer letters are hers to readers or her editor. It isn’t quite a scrapbook, though there are plenty of family photos, renditions of artwork, and shards of manuscripts. The narrative is part research, part history, part literary criticism, part spiritual meditation, and part open wound. “Stories blossom, as a kaleidoscope, a space where events aggregate in infinite designs,” writes Yamashita, who has toyed with form in her much-lauded fiction. Most of these stories are ones she has read in the letters or maybe heard from her parents (her father was a pastor), but they become very much her stories in the telling. “For you, the problem is to separate the fiction from the fact of living,” she writes, addressing “Homer,” though perhaps writing to the reader or herself, “to excavate the origins of our attachments to meaning, the material forensics of human systems, the fork in the road where we could have taken another path. This is the work of history.” This is certainly interpretive history that illuminates the tensions within the Japanese community in America over the war with Japan and the ironies of a country outraged by German concentration camps subjecting the Japanese in America to similar treatment.
Shaped and voiced with literary flair, this is clearly a book Yamashita felt compelled to write, and her sense of purpose makes this historical excavation feel deeply personal.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-487-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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