Intermittently engaging but ultimately disappointing and incomplete.
South Korean president Lee’s rags-to-riches account of his life within the byzantine world of that nation’s business and politics.
At the end of the Korean War, both South Korea and 12-year-old Lee were mired in desperate poverty. “Poverty,” writes Lee, “clung to my family like a leech.” Yet a few decades later South Korea became a world economic power and Lee, at age 35, the president and CEO of South Korea’s most powerful family-owned conglomerate (or chaebol), Hyundai. Lee’s story of his rise is one of absolute commitment to sacrifice and hard work—not uncommon attributes of his generation. He takes readers inside Hyundai, recounting tales of business ventures around the world. He tells of his often-strained relations with Hyundai founder and patriarch, Chung Ju-yung, of internecine battles with other chaebol such as Samsung and of precarious dealings with the military dictatorship that ran South Korea well into the 1980s. While the head of Hyundai, Lee was arrested and interrogated by the authorities. Throughout, the author has little to say about South Korea’s dramatic transition to democracy except that he supported it. He says nothing of the seminal role the struggles of Hyundai-connected labor unions played in that transition. As for his role in politics, which he began after leaving Hyundai in 1991, Lee displayed the same determination that led him to the top of the car manufacturer. Here too, though, there is a vagueness that may leave Western readers baffled. The political part of his story was added to the original version of this book published in 1995, and it has a hurried quality to it. Events unfold in a chronologically haphazard manner, and key elements of South Korean politics such as the role of regionalism and the deep power of political parties are mentioned but left unexplained. While Lee does offer a detailed study of his successful run as mayor of Seoul, which literally transformed the city, he remains largely silent on his rise to the presidency.
Intermittently engaging but ultimately disappointing and incomplete.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4022-6291-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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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