A harrowing recounting of a shameful chapter in American history. Kessler (Journalism/University of Oregon; After All These Years, 1990) is writing as much about one particular immigrant family as about all those malevolent ills that lie beneath the surface only to burst into virulent bloom in times of national stress. By the early 1930's, and despite the Depression, Japanese immigrant Masuo Yasui could be described as a success. Emigrating from Japan at the age of 16, he'd settled in Hood River, Oregon, converted to Christianity, and come to own more than a thousand acres of prime land, a flourishing general store, and numerous franchises. Meanwhile, his son became the first Japanese-American to graduate from law school, while Masuo's six other children were either in, or en route to, college. But Pearl Harbor ended it all, although Kessler notes the growing anti-Asian sentiment in the preceding years: In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens; the Oregon Alien Law made Japanese land-ownership illegal; and the 1924 National Origins Act defined Japanese immigrants as ``undesirable.'' After war was declared, Masuo's wife and most of his children were interned, while Masuo himself, arrested and not freed until after the war, lost most of his property, as well as his standing in the community, and later committed suicide. Masuo's son led the legal fight for reparations, his generation understanding how fragile their place was in American society and determined to ``prove themselves better in order to be considered equal.'' Now, the third generation, after an ``almost aggressive acculturation at the hands of their parents,'' struggles to find its own identity. A somber but illuminating reminder of the perniciousness of prejudice—and of the terrible toll it exacts. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41426-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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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