Finished just before the announcement of the policy’s demise, One Child is a touching and captivating anthropological...
Widespread female infanticide and officials jailing pregnant women’s families to induce them to surrender to abortions—these are scenes not from a dystopian novel but from China’s family planning bureaucracy.
The country’s one-child policy, to be officially phased out in 2016, created more far-reaching social distortions than even its most vociferous critics realized, argues Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Fong in this timely exposé of a reproductive regime whose inner workings Chinese officials have tried hard to keep under wraps. The author, a longtime China correspondent, crisscrossed the country talking with peasants, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and dissidents, and she narrates her travels in a conversational, convivial tone, also discussing her own struggles to conceive. Given the degree to which family planning is embedded in the fabric of the country, it is difficult to predict how the abrupt reversal will play out. Fong describes “China’s birth-planning machinery” as “a bloated behemoth that goes from some 85 million part-time employees at the grass-roots level all the way up to half a million full-time employees at the National Population and Family Planning Commission.” The author uncovers vast regional differences in how the law has been enforced: while some provinces saw huge numbers of women forcibly sterilized, in others, “authorities actually encouraged” large families “so they could collect more fines.” Contemporary China’s gender imbalance is approaching unprecedented levels, and the massive surplus of boys presages problems for both men and women. Although they contribute financially nearly as much as their husbands, women are not traditionally named on house titles, and “given that much of the recent wealth creation in China has come from appreciating values in soaring property markets, Chinese women have therefore been left out of what is arguably the biggest accumulation of residential real estate wealth in history: some $27 trillion worth” by some estimates.
Finished just before the announcement of the policy’s demise, One Child is a touching and captivating anthropological investigation of one of the most invasive laws ever devised.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-27539-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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