An affecting memoir and a convincing plea for pacifism: Steinman’s hypnotizing prose exposes the senselessness of war by...
Steinman travels back in time and across the globe to capture the horrors of WWII as experienced by her father and a Japanese soldier, whom he may have killed.
The author starts with childhood memories of her depressed father, Norman, a pragmatic pharmacist, who, after surviving combat in the Philippines, became emotionally withdrawn from his family. After her parents’ deaths, Steinman discovers the roots of Norman’s melancholy in a collection of candid letters that Norman, as a 27-year-old draftee, wrote to her mother detailing his military days—from his infantry training in Texas in 1943 to his departure from a defeated Japan in 1945. The passionate Norman of the past was frustrated by his separation from his family and the meaningless deaths of his army buddies. He was also terrified of fighting fanatical Japanese soldiers who would prefer to perform hara-kiri––ceremonial suicide––before dishonoring Emperor Hirohito with their surrender. Norman’s chronology is interspersed with Steinman’s own eloquent reflections in which she divulges her new sympathy for the repressed man who raised her. The narrative becomes more intriguing when Steinman finds an unsettling souvenir among the letters: a blood-stained Japanese flag, which bears the name of a soldier, Shimizu. Hoping to help others deal with grief, Steinman goes on a quest to return the flag to Shimizu’s surviving family. Traveling to Japan and the Philippines, Steinman locates the graves of Norman’s unlucky war buddies. She also forms friendships with Japanese citizens of Shimizu's hometown, who help her realize the heinous aftermath of America's atom-bomb attack on Hiroshima. During her journey, Steinman both unearths a complex portrait of the real Norman and acquires empathy for the postwar woes of the Japanese.
An affecting memoir and a convincing plea for pacifism: Steinman’s hypnotizing prose exposes the senselessness of war by showing how conflicting governments have destroyed families by ripping common people out of their homes and forcing them to kill each other.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-310-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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